Octavio Paz
Beyond happiness or unhappiness, though it is both things, love is intensity; it does not give us eternity but life, that second in which the doors of time and space open just a crack: here is there and now is always.Collection: Love Is
Art is what remains of religion: the dance above the yawning abyss.Collection: Art
When we learn to speak, we learn to translate.Collection: Speak
A glass pitcher, a wicker basket, a tunic of coarse cloth. Their beauty is inseparable from their function. Handicrafts belong to a world existing before the separation of the useful and the beautiful.Collection: Beautiful
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.Collection: Past
If each of my words were a drop of water, you would see through them and glimpse what I feel: gratitude, acknowledgement.Collection: Thank You
What sets worlds in motion is the interplay of differences, their attractions and repulsions; life is plurality, death is uniformity.Collection: Life
Images, memories, fragmentary shapes and forms all those sensations, visions, half-thoughts that appear and disappear in the wink of an eye, as one sets forth to meet.... The path also disappears as I think of it, as I say it.Collection: Memories
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.Collection: Confused
Watching I watch myself, what I see is my creation as though entering through my eyes perception is conception into an eye more crystal clear water of thoughts, what I watch watches me, I am the creation of what I seeCollection: Eye
Loving means getting rid of names.Collection: Mean
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? To learn the art of remaining motionless amid the agitation of the whirlwind, to learn to remain still and to be as transparent as this fixed light amid the frantic branches this may be a program for life.Collection: Art
If society abolishes poetry it commits spiritual suicide.Collection: Suicide
Grace is gratuitous; it is a gift.Collection: Giving
It may seem paradoxical to say that we have been expelled from the present, but it is a feeling we have all had at some moment. Some of us experienced it first as a condemnation, later transformed into consciousness and action. The search for the present is neither the pursuit of an earthly paradise nor that of a timeless eternity: it is the search for a real reality.Collection: Real
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.Collection: Real
Contemporary man has rationalized the myths, but he has not been able to destroy them.Collection: Men
What characterizes a poem is its necessary dependence on words as much as its struggle to transcend them.Collection: Art
I thought that the world was a vast system of signs, a conversation between giant beings. My actions, the cricket's saw, the star's blink, were nothing but pauses and syllables, scattered phrases from that dialogue. What word could it be, of which I was only a syllable? Who speaks the word? To whom is it spoken?Collection: Stars
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.Collection: Two
Enormous and solid but swaying, beaten by the wind but chained, murmur of a million leaves against my window. Riot of trees, surge of dark green sounds. The grove, suddenly still, is a web of fronds and branches.Collection: Dark
Without democracy freedom is a chimeraCollection: Democracy
Poet: gardener of epitaphs.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Soul
For every language that becomes extinct, an image of man disappears.Collection: Men
To fight evil is to fight ourselves.Collection: Fighting
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."Collection: Life
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.Collection: Running
Love is the revelation of the other person's freedom.Collection: Love Is
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.Collection: Reality
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.Collection: Progress
Humankind is never what he is but the self he seeks.Collection: Self
There is nothing sacred or untouchable except the freedom to think. Without criticism, that is to say, without rigor and experimentation, there is no science, without criticism there is no art or literature. I would also say that without criticism there is no healthy society.Collection: Art
Love is born at first sight; the friendship of a frequent and lengthy exchange.Collection: Love Is
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.Collection: Order
Each time we try to express ourselves we have to break with ourselves.Collection: Creativity
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.Collection: Believe
Whatever is not stone is lightCollection: Light
My body, plowed by your body, will turn into a field where one is sown and a hundred reaped.Collection: Body
Poetry is not truth, it is the resurrection of presences.Collection: Resurrection
With great difficulty advancing by millimeters each year, I carve a road out of the rock. For millenniums my teeth have wasted and my nails broken to get there, to the other side, to the light and the open air. And now that my hands bleed and my teeth tremble, unsure in a cavity cracked by thirst and dust, I pause and contemplate my work. I have spent the second part of my life breaking the stones, drilling the walls, smashing the doors, removing the obstacles I placed between the light and myself in the first part of my life.Collection: Wall
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.Collection: Names
Modern man likes to pretend that his thinking is wide-awake. But this wide-awake thinking has led us into the mazes of a nightmare in which the torture chambers are endlessly repeated in the mirrors of reason.Collection: Men
Solitude is the profoundest factCollection: Solitude
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.Collection: Delight
Power immobilizes; it freezes with a single gesture-grandiose, terrible, theatrical, or finally, simply monotonous-the variety which is life.Collection: Power
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.Collection: Lying