Octavio Paz Quotes - Page 2

Quotes about:

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

  Octavio Paz

  Wisdom, Lying, Learning

  Octavio Paz (1981). “The Monkey Grammarian”, p.10, Arcade Publishing

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• Whatever is not stone is light

  Octavio Paz

  Light, Mexican, Poetry

  Octavio Paz, Eliot Weinberger, G. Aroul (1984). “Selected Poems”, p.4, New Directions Publishing

  70 Copy quote

• 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.

  Octavio Paz

  Men, Thinking, Doe

  Octavio Paz (1973). “Alternating Current”, p.49, Arcade Publishing

  56 Copy quote

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

  Octavio Paz

  Love Is, Sight, Firsts

  26 Copy quote

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

  Octavio Paz

  Creativity, Trying, Break

  Octavio Paz (1985). “The Labyrinth of Solitude: And the Other Mexico ; Return to the Labyrinth of Solitude ; Mexico and the United States ; The Philanthropic Ogre”, p.53, Grove Press

  36 Copy quote

• 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.

  Octavio Paz

  Progress, Giants, Done

  Octavio Paz (1973). “Alternating Current”, p.121, Arcade Publishing

  49 Copy quote

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

  Octavio Paz

  Discovery, Self, Realization

  Octavio Paz (1985). “The Labyrinth of Solitude: And the Other Mexico ; Return to the Labyrinth of Solitude ; Mexico and the United States ; The Philanthropic Ogre”, p.9, Grove Press

  19 Copy quote

• It is always difficult to give oneself up; few persons anywhere ever succeed in doing so, and even fewer transcend the possessive stage to know love for what it actually is: a perpetual discovery, and immersion in the waters of reality, an unending re-creation.

  Octavio Paz

  Reality, Discovery, Giving

  25 Copy quote

• To fight evil is to fight ourselves.

  Octavio Paz

  Fighting, Evil

  Octavio Paz (1999). “Itinerary”

  8 Copy quote

• Today we all speak, if not the same tongue, the same universal language. There is no one center, and time has lost its former coherence: East and West, yesterday and tomorrow exist as a confused jumble in each one of us. Different times and different spaces are combined in a here and now that is everywhere at once.

  Octavio Paz

  Confused, Yesterday, Space

  Octavio Paz (1973). “Alternating Current”, p.21, Arcade Publishing

  56 Copy quote

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

  Octavio Paz

  Self, Humans, Human Beings

  "The Double Flame: Love and Eroticism".

  56 Copy quote

• Because two bodies, naked and entwined, leap over time, they are invulnerable, nothing can touch them, they return to the source. There is no you, no I, no tomorrow, no yesterday, no names, the truth of two in a single body, a single soul, oh total being.

  Octavio Paz

  Names, Two, Yesterday

  Octavio Paz, Eliot Weinberger (1991). “The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz, 1957-1987”, p.19, New Directions Publishing

  26 Copy quote

• Eroticism is first and foremost a thirst for otherness. And the supernatural is the supreme otherness. This is perhaps the most noble aim of poetry, to attach ourselves to the world around us, to turn desire into love, to embrace, finally what always evades us, what is beyond, but what is always there – the unspoken, the spirit, the soul.

  Octavio Paz

  Soul, Desire, Noble

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• listen to me as one listens to the rain, the years go by, the moments return, do you hear the footsteps in the next room? not here, not there: you hear them in another time that is now, listen to the footsteps of time, inventor of places with no weight, nowhere, listen to the rain running over the terrace, the night is now more night in the grove, lightning has nestled among the leaves, a restless garden adrift-go in, your shadow covers this page.

  Octavio Paz

  Running, Rain, Night

  Octavio Paz, “As One Listens To The Rain”

  18 Copy quote

• Poetry is not truth, it is the resurrection of presences.

  Octavio Paz

  Resurrection, Poetry Is

  Octavio Paz, Eliot Weinberger, G. Aroul (1984). “Selected Poems”, p.118, New Directions Publishing

  7 Copy quote

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

  Octavio Paz

  Love Is, Revelations, Persons

  23 Copy quote

• Distraction is our habitual state. Not the distraction of the person who withdraws from the world in order to shut himself up in the secret and ever-changing land of his fantasy, but the distraction of the person who is always outside himself, lost in the trivial, senseless, turmoil of everyday life.

  Octavio Paz

  Order, Land, Secret

  10 Copy quote

• The beloved is already in our being, as thirst and "otherness." Being is eroticism. Inspiration is that strange
  voice that takes man out of himself to be every thing that he is, everything that he desires; another body,
  another being. Beyond, outside of me, in the green and gold thicket, among the tremulous branches,
  sings the unknown. It calls to me.

  Octavio Paz

  Inspiration, Men, Voice

  49 Copy quote

• The world is born when two people kiss

  Octavio Paz

  Kissing, Two, People

  Octavio Paz, Eliot Weinberger (1991). “The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz, 1957-1987”, p.21, New Directions Publishing

  22 Copy quote

• 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.

  Octavio Paz

  Way, Path, Easy

  Octavio Paz, Eliot Weinberger (1998). “In Light of India”, p.161, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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

  Octavio Paz

  Men, Able, Myth

  Octavio Paz (1985). “The labyrinth of solitude ; The other Mexico ; Return to the labyrinth of solitude ; Mexico and the United States ; The philanthropic ogre”, Grove/Atlantic

  23 Copy quote

• We must cultivate and defend particularity, individuality, and irregularity-life. Human beings do not have a future in the collectivism of bureaucratic states or in the mass society created by capitalism. Every system, by virtue as much of its abstract nature as of its pretension to totality, is the enemy of life. As a forgotten Spanish poet, José Moreno Villa, put it with melancholy wit: "I have discovered in symmetry the root of much iniquity."

  Octavio Paz

  Life, Roots, Individuality

  Octavio Paz (1987). “1904-1912”, San Diego : Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

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

  Octavio Paz

  Body, Fields, Hundred

  Octavio Paz, Eliot Weinberger, G. Aroul (1984). “Selected Poems”, p.18, New Directions Publishing

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• 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.

  Octavio Paz

  Past, Thinking, Our Society

  28 Copy quote

• We pursue modernity in her incessant metamorphoses yet we never manage to trap her. She always escapes: each encounter ends in flight. We embrace her and she disappears immediately: it was just a little air. It is the instant, that bird that is everywhere and nowhere. We want to trap it alive but it flaps its wings and vanishes in the form of a handful of syllables. We are left empty-handed. Then the doors of perception open slightly and the other time appears, the real one we were searching for without knowing it: the present, the presence.

  Octavio Paz

  Real, Air, Doors

  Octavio Paz's Nobel Lecture, www.nobelprize.org. December 8, 1990.

  37 Copy quote

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