Octavio Paz Quotes
When a society decays, it is language that is first to become gangrenous. As a result, social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings
The ideal of a single civilization for everyone, implicit in the cult of progress and technique, impoverishes and mutilates us
What characterizes a poem is its necessary dependence on words as much as its struggle to transcend them.
What sets worlds in motion is the interplay of differences, their attractions and repulsions; life is plurality, death is uniformity.
Changes are inseparable from democracy. To defend democracy is to defend the possibility of change; in turn, changes alone can strengthen democracy.
No one behind, no one ahead. The path the ancients cleared has closed. And the other path, everyone's path, easy and wide, goes nowhere. I am alone and find my way.
Self-discovery is above all the realization that we are alone: it is the opening of an impalpable, transparent wall-that of our consciousness-between the world and ourselves.
Solitude lies at the lowest depth of the human condition. Man is the only being who feels himself to be alone and the only one who is searching for the Other.
Drugs are nihilistic: they undermine all values and radically overturn all our ideas about good and evil, what is just and what is unjust, what is permitted and what is forbidden.
Language lies outside of society because it is its foundation; but it also lies within society because that is the only place where it exists and the only place where it develops.
Power immobilizes; it freezes with a single gesture-grandiose, terrible, theatrical, or finally, simply monotonous-the variety which is life.
Poets have the gift to speak for others, Vasko Popa had the very rare quality of hearing the others.
The whole motley confusion of acts, omissions, regrets and hopes which is the life of each one of us finds in death, not meaning or explanation, but an end.
The idea of modernity is beginning to lose its vitality. It is losing it because modernity is no longer a critical attitude but an accepted, codified convention.
To reduce poetry to its reflections of historical events and movements would be like reducing the poet's words to their logical or grammatical connotations.
life is other, always there, further off, beyond you andbeyond me, always on the horizon, life which unlives us and makes us strangers, that invents our face and wears it away
The object of poetic activity is essentially language: whatever his beliefs & convictions, the poet is more concerned with words than what these words designate.
Everything is language.
Death and birth are solitary experiences. We are born alone and we die alone. When we are expelled from the maternal womb, we begin the painful struggle that finally ends in death.
I went to the little window and inhaled the country air. One could hear the breathing of the night, feminine, enormous.("The Blue Bouquet")
I went to the little window and inhaled the country air. One could hear the breathing of the night, feminine, enormous.
Reality is a staircase going neither up nor down we don't move today is today always is today.
A society is defined as much by how it comes to terms with its past as by its attitude toward the future: its memories are no less revealing than its aims.
Wisdom lies neither in fixity nor in change, but in the dialectic between the two. A constant coming and going: wisdom lies in the momentary.
Surrealism is not a poetry but a poetics, and even more, and more decisively, a world vision.
Poetry is the experience of liberty. The poet risks himself, chances all on the poem's all with each verse he writes.
Poetry, whatever the manifest content of the poem, is always a violation of the rationalism and morality of bourgeois society.
Any reflection about poetry should begin, or end, with this question: who and how many read poetry books?
Self-discovery is above all the realization that we are alone: it is the opening of an impalpable, transparent wall - that of our consciousness - between the world and ourselves.
