Octavio Paz Quotes

The Mexican...is familiar with death. [He] jokes about it, caresses it, sleeps with it, celebrates it. It is one of his favorite toys and his most steadfast love.

Beyond myself, somewhere, I wait for my arrival.

Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone.

To love is to battle, to open doors, to cease to be a ghost with a number forever in chains, forever condemned by a faceless master; the world changes if two look at each other and see.

Deserve your dream.

A flower without a stem, is beauty waiting to die. A heart without love, is a tear waiting to cry.

Love is not a desire for beauty; it is a yearning for completion.

A civilization that denies death ends by denying life.

Whatever is not stone is light

Every moment is nothing without end.

To love is to undress our names.

To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears.

Man does not speak because he thinks; he thinks because he speaks. Or rather, speaking is no different than thinking: to speak is to think.

Humankind is never what he is but the self he seeks.

The American: a titan enamored of progress, a fanatical giant who worships "getting things done" but never asks himself what he is doing nor why he is doing it.

By suppressing differences and peculiarities, by eliminating different civilizations and cultures, progress weakens life and favors death

Light is time thinking about itself.

Each time we try to express ourselves we have to break with ourselves.

I don't believe that there are dangerous writers: the danger of certain books is not in the books themselves but in the passions of their readers.

Love is an attempt at penetrating another being, but it can only succeed if the surrender is mutual.

Love is born at first sight; the friendship of a frequent and lengthy exchange.

Poetry, in the past, was the center of our society, but with modernity it has retreated to the outskirts. I think the exile of poetry is also the exile of the best of humankind.

Contemporary man has rationalized the myths, but he has not been able to destroy them.

Love is the revelation of the other person's freedom.

The world is born when two people kiss

What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism.

The purpose of poetry is to restore to mankind the possibility to wonder.

Art is an invention of aesthetics, which in turn is an invention of philosophers... What we call art is a game.

Self-discovery is above all the realization that we are alone.

If each of my words were a drop of water, you would see through them and glimpse what I feel: gratitude, acknowledgement.

Without democracy freedom is a chimera

Poet: gardener of epitaphs.

Wisdom lies neither in fixity nor in change, but in the dialectic between the two.

Tradition is no longer a continuity but a series of sharp breaks. The modern tradition is the tradition of revolt.

For every language that becomes extinct, an image of man disappears.

There can be no society without poetry, but society can never be realized as poetry, it is never poetic. Sometimes the two terms seek to break apart. They cannot.

We are condemned to kill time, thus we die bit by bit.

The universe unfolds in the body, which is its mirror and its creature.

Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society.

Social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings.

My body, plowed by your body, will turn into a field where one is sown and a hundred reaped.

Every view of the world that becomes extinct, every culture that disappears, diminishes a possibility of life

Death is the mother of forms.

Reality is a staircase going neither up nor down, we don't move; today is today, always is today.

If society abolishes poetry it commits spiritual suicide.

It is the Revolution, the magical word, the word that is going to change everything, that is going to bring us immense delight and a quick death.

Solitude is the profoundest fact

Grace is gratuitous; it is a gift.

The woman who died night after night and her dying was a long goodbye, a train that never left.

When we learn to speak, we learn to translate.