Octavio Paz

Image of Octavio Paz
Man is alone everywhere. But the solitude of the Mexican, under the great stone night of the high plateau that is still inhabited by insatiable gods, is very different from that of the North American, who wanders in an abstract world of machines, fellow citizens and moral precepts.
- Octavio Paz
Image of Octavio Paz
Human writing reflects that of the universe; it is its translation, but also its metaphor: it says something totally different, and it says the same thing.
- Octavio Paz
Image of Octavio Paz
To us, the value of a work lies in its newness: the invention of new forms, or a novel combination of old forms, the discovery of unknown worlds or the exploration of unfamiliar areas in worlds already discovered - revelations, surprises.
- Octavio Paz
Image of Octavio Paz
No one is alone, and each change here brings about another change there.
- Octavio Paz
Image of Octavio Paz
The work of art is always unfaithful to its creator... Art lays at a higher level; it says something more, and almost always, it says something different from what the artist wanted to say.
- Octavio Paz
Image of Octavio Paz
Picasso is what is going to happen and what is happening; he is posterity and archaic time, the distant ancestor and our next-door neighbor. Speed permits him to be two places at once, to belong to all the centuries without letting go of the here and now.
- Octavio Paz
Image of Octavio Paz
Sensation is amphibious: at the same time it joins us to and divides us from things. It is the door through which we enter into things but also through which we come out of them and realize that we are not things.
- Octavio Paz
Image of Octavio Paz
It has always surprised me that in a world of relations as hard as that of the United States, cordiality constantly springs out like water from an unstanchable fountain.
- Octavio Paz
Image of Octavio Paz
Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society.
- Octavio Paz
Image of Octavio Paz
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
Image of Octavio Paz
If we are a metaphor of the universe, the human couple is the metaphor par excellence, the point of intersection of all forces and the seed of all forms. The couple is time recaptured, the return to the time before time.
- Octavio Paz
Image of Octavio Paz
Literatures, like trees and plants, are born of a land and in it flourish and die. But literatures, also like plants, may be carried abroad to take root in a foreign soil.
- Octavio Paz
Image of Octavio Paz
An understanding of Sor Juana's work must include an understanding of the prohibitions her work confronts. Her speech leads us to what cannot be said, what cannot be said to an orthodoxy, the orthodoxy to a tribunal, and the tribunal to a sentence.
- Octavio Paz
Image of Octavio Paz
The world stretches before me, the vast world of the big, the little, and the medium.
- Octavio Paz
Image of Octavio Paz
Despite the often illusory nature of essays on the psychology of a nation, it seems to me there is something revealing in the insistence with which a people will question itself during certain periods of its growth.
- Octavio Paz
Image of Octavio Paz
The minority of Mexicans who are aware of their own selves do not make up a closed or unchanging class. They are the only active group, in comparison with the Indian-Spanish inertia of the rest, and ever day they are shaping the country more and more into their own image.
- Octavio Paz
Image of Octavio Paz
The Mexican succumbs very easily to sentimental effusions, and therefore he shuns them.
- Octavio Paz
Image of Octavio Paz
In the United States, man does not feel that he has been torn from the center of creation and suspended between hostile forces. He has built his own world, and it is built in his own image: it is his mirror. But now he cannot recognize himself in his inhuman objects, nor in his fellows.
- Octavio Paz
Image of Octavio Paz
One of the most notable traits of the Mexican's character is his willingness to contemplate horror: he is even familiar and complacent in his dealings with it.
- Octavio Paz
Image of Octavio Paz
The object of poetic activity is essentially language: whatever his beliefs and convictions, the poet is more concerned with words than with what these words designate.
- Octavio Paz
Image of Octavio Paz
In antiquity, a woman might be an object of worship or desire, but never of love.
- Octavio Paz
Image of Octavio Paz
Changes in our aesthetic tastes have no value or meaning in and of themselves; what has value and meaning is the idea of change itself. Or, better stated: not change in and of itself, but change as an agent or inspiration of modern creations.
- Octavio Paz
Image of Octavio Paz
If contemporary artists sincerely seek to be original, unique, and new, they should begin by disregarding the notions of originality, individuality, and innovation: they are the cliches of our time.
- Octavio Paz
Image of Octavio Paz
In the works of Duchamp, space begins to walk and take on form; it becomes a machine that spins arguments and philosophizes; it resists movement with delay and delay with irony.
- Octavio Paz
Image of Octavio Paz
Art for Duchamp, all the arts, obey the same law: meta-irony is inherent in their very spirit. It is an irony that destroys its own negation and, hence, returns in the affirmative.
- Octavio Paz
Image of Octavio Paz
Futurists wanted to suggest movement by means of a dynamic painting; Duchamp applies the notion of delay - or, rather, or analysis - to movement.
- Octavio Paz
Image of Octavio Paz
We go along, without a fixed itinerary, yet at the same time with an end (what end?) in mind, and with the aim of reaching the end. A search for the end, a dread of the end: the obverse and the reverse of the same act.
- Octavio Paz
Image of Octavio Paz
Yes, I am well aware that nature - or what we call nature: that totality of objects and processes that surrounds us and that alternately creates us and devours us - is neither our accomplice nor our confidant.
- Octavio Paz
Image of Octavio Paz
It is not proper to project our feelings onto things or to attribute our own sensations and passions to them. Can it also be improper to see in them a guide, a way of life?
- Octavio Paz
Image of Octavio Paz
Fixity is always momentary. But how can it always be so? If it were, it would not be momentary - or would not be fixity.
- Octavio Paz
Image of Octavio Paz
Beyond myself, somewhere, I wait for my arrival.
- Octavio Paz
Collection: Waiting
Image of Octavio Paz
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.
- Octavio Paz
Collection: Sleep
Image of Octavio Paz
A flower without a stem, is beauty waiting to die. A heart without love, is a tear waiting to cry.
- Octavio Paz
Collection: Flower
Image of Octavio Paz
What sets worlds in motion is the interplay of differences, their attractions and repulsions. Life is plurality, death is uniformity. By suppressing differences and pecularities, by eliminating different civilizations and cultures, progress weakens life and favors death. The ideal of a single civilization for everyone, implicit in the cult of progress and technique, impoverishes and mutilates us. Every view of the world that becomes extinct, every culture that disappears, diminishes a possibility of life
- Octavio Paz
Collection: Views
Image of Octavio Paz
Love is not a desire for beauty; it is a yearning for completion.
- Octavio Paz
Collection: Love Is
Image of Octavio Paz
A civilization that denies death ends by denying life.
- Octavio Paz
Collection: Death
Image of Octavio Paz
The supreme value is not the future but the present. The future is a deceitful time that always says to us, 'Not Yet,' and thus denies us... Whoever builds a house for future happiness builds a prison for the present.
- Octavio Paz
Collection: House
Image of Octavio Paz
The purpose of poetry is to restore to mankind the possibility to wonder.
- Octavio Paz
Collection: Purpose
Image of Octavio Paz
Light is time thinking about itself.
- Octavio Paz
Collection: Thinking
Image of Octavio Paz
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.
- Octavio Paz
Collection: Love
Image of Octavio Paz
Reality is a staircase going neither up nor down, we don't move; today is today, always is today.
- Octavio Paz
Collection: Moving
Image of Octavio Paz
To love is to undress our names.
- Octavio Paz
Collection: Love Is
Image of Octavio Paz
Believing ourselves to be possessors of absolute truth degrades us: we regard every person whose way of thinking is different from ours as a monster and a threat and by so doing turn our own selves into monsters and threats to our fellows.
- Octavio Paz
Collection: Truth
Image of Octavio Paz
Self-discovery is above all the realization that we are alone.
- Octavio Paz
Collection: Discovery
Image of Octavio Paz
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
Collection: Way
Image of Octavio Paz
The world is born when two people kiss
- Octavio Paz
Collection: Kissing
Image of Octavio Paz
Every moment is nothing without end.
- Octavio Paz
Collection: Moments
Image of Octavio Paz
The universe unfolds in the body, which is its mirror and its creature.
- Octavio Paz
Collection: Mirrors
Image of Octavio Paz
By suppressing differences and peculiarities, by eliminating different civilizations and cultures, progress weakens life and favors death
- Octavio Paz
Collection: Civilization