99+ Octavio Paz Quotes (Eloquent, Introspective And Surreal)

Octavio Paz was a Mexican poet, essayist, and diplomat. He was the winner of the 1990 Nobel Prize in Literature, and is considered one of the greatest poets of the 20th century. His works explored the nature of human existence and its relationship with the universe, and he is credited with introducing modernism to Mexican literature.

Top 10 Octavio Paz Quotes

1. 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.
2. Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone.
3. A flower without a stem, is beauty waiting to die. A heart without love, is a tear waiting to cry.
4. Wisdom lies neither in fixity nor in change, but in the dialectic between the two.
5. Love is not a desire for beauty; it is a yearning for completion.
6. A civilization that denies death ends by denying life.
7. Whatever is not stone is light
8. 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.
9. What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism.
10. Love is born at first sight; the friendship of a frequent and lengthy exchange.

Octavio Paz Image Quotes

A civilization that denies death ends by denying life. — Octavio Paz

Octavio Paz Short Quotes

• The purpose of poetry is to restore to mankind the possibility to wonder.
• Self-discovery is above all the realization that we are alone.
• Without democracy freedom is a chimera
• We are condemned to kill time, thus we die bit by bit.
• Poet: gardener of epitaphs.
• Social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings.
• If society abolishes poetry it commits spiritual suicide.
• Reality is a staircase going neither up nor down, we don't move; today is today, always is today.
• The woman who died night after night and her dying was a long goodbye, a train that never left.
• Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society.

Octavio Paz Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

Technology is not an image of the world but a way of operating on reality. The nihilism of technology lies not only in the fact that it is the most perfect expression of the will to power... but also in the fact that it lacks meaning. — Octavio Paz

A civilization that denies death ends by denying life. — Octavio Paz

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

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. — Octavio Paz

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

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. — Octavio Paz

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

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. — Octavio Paz

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

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

Cubism had been an analysis of the object and an attempt to put it before us in its totality; both as analysis and as synthesis, it was a criticism of appearance. Surrealism transmuted the object, and suddenly a canvas became an apparition: a new figuration, a real transfiguration. — Octavio Paz

Revolt is the violence of an entire people; rebellion the unruliness of an individual or an uprising by a minority; both are spontaneous and blind. Revolution is both planned and spontaneous, a science and an art. — Octavio Paz

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

Mineral cactai, quicksilver lizards in the adobe walls, the bird that punctures space, thirst, tedium, clouds of dust, impalpable epiphanies of wind. The pines taught me to talk to myself. In that garden I learnedto send myself off. Later there were no gardens. — 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

Ruy-Sanchez's works of fiction are always amazing: adventure, poetry and intelligence in a new geometry of words... His writing has nerve and agility, his intelligence is sharp without being cruel, his mood is sympathetic without complicity. — 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

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

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

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. — Octavio Paz

Literature is the expression of a feeling of deprivation, a recourse against a sense of something missing. But the contrary is also true: language is what makes us human. It is a recourse against the meaningless noise and silence of nature and history. — Octavio Paz

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. — Octavio Paz

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. — Octavio Paz

I sat at the foot of a huge tree, a statue of the night, and tried to make an inventory of all I had seen, heard, smelled, and felt: dizziness, horror, stupor, astonishment, joy, enthusiasm, nausea, inescapable attraction. What had attracted me? It was difficult to say: Human kind cannot bear much reality. — Octavio Paz

Surrealism is not a school of poetry but a movement of liberation... A way of rediscovering the language of innocence, a renewal of the primordial pact, poetry is the basic text, the foundation of the human order. Surrealism is revolutionary because it is a return to the beginning of all beginnings. — Octavio Paz

The ideal of a single civilization for everyone, implicit in the cult of progress and technique, impoverishes and mutilates us — Octavio Paz

What characterizes a poem is its necessary dependence on words as much as its struggle to transcend them. — Octavio Paz

Changes are inseparable from democracy. To defend democracy is to defend the possibility of change; in turn, changes alone can strengthen democracy. — Octavio Paz

Art is what remains of religion: the dance above the yawning abyss. — Octavio Paz

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 — Octavio Paz

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

Erotic acts are instinctive; they fulfill a role in nature. The idea is familiar, but it is one that contains a paradox: there is nothing more natural than sexual desire; there is nothing less natural than the forms in which it is made manifest and satisfied. — Octavio Paz

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

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

What sets worlds in motion is the interplay of differences, their attractions and repulsions; life is plurality, death is uniformity. — Octavio Paz

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 see — Octavio Paz

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

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. — Octavio Paz

Power immobilizes; it freezes with a single gesture-grandiose, terrible, theatrical, or finally, simply monotonous-the variety which is life. — Octavio Paz

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

Man, even man debased by the neocapitalism and pseudosocialism of our time, is a marvelous being because he sometimes speaks. Language is the mark, the sign, not of his fall but of his original innocence. Through the Word we may regain the lost kingdom and recover powers we possessed in the far-distant past. — 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

The North American system only wants to consider the positive aspects of reality. Men and women are subjected from childhood to an inexorable process of adaptation; certain principles, contained in brief formulas are endlessly repeated by the Press, the radio, the churches, and the schools, and by those kindly, sinister beings, the North American mothers and wives. A person imprisoned by these schemes is like a plant in a flowerpot too small for it: he cannot grow or mature. — Octavio Paz

Poetry is not truth, it is the resurrection of presences. — Octavio Paz

The world is born when two people kiss — Octavio Paz

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. — Octavio Paz

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. — Octavio Paz

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

By diminishing the value of silence, publicity has also diminished that of language. The two are inseparable: knowing how to speak has always meant knowing how to keep silent, knowing that there are times when one should say nothing. — Octavio Paz

Light is time thinking about itself. — Octavio Paz

Poets have the gift to speak for others, Vasko Popa had the very rare quality of hearing the others. — 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? 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. — Octavio Paz

To fight evil is to fight ourselves. — Octavio Paz

Solitude is the profoundest fact — Octavio Paz

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

What is art? A violet. Is that all? An artistic style is a living entity, a continuous process of invention. It can never be imposed from without; born of the profoundest tendencies within a society, its direction is to a certain extent unpredictable, in much the same way as the eventual configuration of a tree's branches. — Octavio Paz

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. — Octavio Paz

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

Two opposing forces inhabit the poem: one of elevation or up-rooting, which pulls the word from the language: the other of gravity, which makes it return. The poem is an original and unique creation, but it is also reading and recitation: participation. The poet creates it; the people, by recitation, re-create it. Poet and reader are two moments of a single reality. — Octavio Paz

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. — Octavio Paz

Death is the mother of forms. — Octavio Paz

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

Loving means getting rid of names. — Octavio Paz

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. — Octavio Paz

Beyond myself, somewhere, I wait for my arrival. — Octavio Paz

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. — Octavio Paz

Every moment is nothing without end. — Octavio Paz

Humankind is never what he is but the self he seeks. — Octavio Paz

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. — Octavio Paz

Grace is gratuitous; it is a gift. — Octavio Paz

Love is the revelation of the other person's freedom. — Octavio Paz

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? — Octavio Paz

To love is to undress our names. — Octavio Paz

The value of e-commerce is not in the e, but in the commerce. — Octavio Paz

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. — Octavio Paz

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

When we learn to speak, we learn to translate. — Octavio Paz

Each time we try to express ourselves we have to break with ourselves. — Octavio Paz

Life Lessons by Octavio Paz

1. Octavio Paz encourages us to embrace the beauty of life by appreciating the small moments, understanding the power of language, and recognizing the importance of connecting with nature.
2. He teaches us to be mindful of our actions and to strive for a deeper understanding of the world around us.
3. He reminds us to remain open to new experiences and to appreciate the diversity of cultures, languages, and ideas.