Top 100 Octavio Paz Quotes
#1. Words are things, but things which mean. We cannot do away with meaning without doing away with signs, that is, with language itself. Moreover, we would have to do away with the universe. All the things man touches are impregnated with meaning.
Octavio Paz
#2. I do not know if the story repeats itself: I only know that people change little
Octavio Paz
#3. The modern tradition is the tradition of revolt. The French Revolution is still our model today: history is violent change, and this change goes by the name of progress. I do not know whether these notions really apply to art.
Octavio Paz
#4. 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
#5. Abstract painting seeks to be a pure pictorial language, and thus attempts to escape the essential impurity of all languages: the recourse to signs or forms that have meanings shared by everyone.
Octavio Paz
#6. Love is an attempt to penetrate another being, but it can only be realized if the surrender is mutual.
Octavio Paz
#7. Our judgment and moral categories, our idea of the future, our opinions about the present or about justice, peace, or war, everything, without excluding our rejections of Marxism, is impregnated with Marxism.
Octavio Paz
#8. The object of poetic activity is essentially language: whatever his beliefs & convictions, the poet is more concerned with words than what these words designate.
Octavio Paz
#9. Wisdom lies neither in fixity nor in change, but in the dialectic between the two.
Octavio Paz
#10. If each of my words were a drop of water, you would see through them and glimpse what I feel: gratitude, acknowledgement.
Octavio Paz
#11. 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.
Octavio Paz
#12. A saint speaks with God or with himself, two forms of silence.
Octavio Paz
#13. Perhaps things are not things but words: metaphors, words for other things.
Octavio Paz
#14. Contemporary man has rationalized the myths, but he has not been able to destroy them.
Octavio Paz
#15. Poems - crystallizations of the universal play of analogy, transparent objects which, as they reproduce the mechanism and the rotary motion of analogy, are waterspouts of new analogies.
Octavio Paz
#16. Poetry is not a genre in harmony with the modern world; its innermost nature is hostile or indifferent to the dogmas of modern times, progress and the cult of the future.
Octavio Paz
#17. Art is an invention of aesthetics, which in turn is an invention of philosophers ... What we call art is a game.
Octavio Paz
#18. Love is an attempt at penetrating another being, but it can only succeed if the surrender is mutual.
Octavio Paz
#19. 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
#20. 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.
Octavio Paz
#21. The past reappears because it is a hidden present.
Octavio Paz
#22. 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
#23. A flower without a stem, is beauty waiting to die. A heart without love, is a tear waiting to cry.
Octavio Paz
#24. 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
#25. The universe unfolds in the body, which is its mirror and its creature.
Octavio Paz
#26. 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.
Octavio Paz
#27. To be a great painter means to be a great poet: someone who transcends the limits of his language.
Octavio Paz
#28. 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
#29. For the Chinese, the Greeks, the Mayans, or the Egyptians, nature was a living totality, a creative being. For this reason, art, according to Aristotle, is imitation; the poet imitates the creative gesture of nature.
Octavio Paz
#30. 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
#31. Reality is a staircase going neither up nor down, we don't move; today is today, always is today.
Octavio Paz
#32. Art is what remains of religion: the dance above the yawning abyss.
Octavio Paz
#33. Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world.
To learn to be silent
Like the oak and linden of fable.
To learn to see
Octavio Paz
#34. 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
#35. In antiquity, a woman might be an object of worship or desire, but never of love.
Octavio Paz
#36. You are you and your body of steam,
you and your face of night,
you and your hair, unhurried lightning,
you cross the street and enter my forehead,
footsteps of water across my eyes,
listen to me as one listens to the rain
Octavio Paz
#37. 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
#38. Que busca? Tal vez busca su destino. Tal vez su destino es buscar.
... what is he searching for? Perhaps he searches for his destiny. Perhaps his destiny is to search.
Octavio Paz
#39. Man, it seems to me, is not in history: he is history.
Octavio Paz
#40. An unread author is an author who is a victim of the worst kind of censorship, indifference - a censorship more effective than the Ecclesiastical Index.
Octavio Paz
#41. 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
#42. The relations between rhetoric and ethics are disturbing: the ease with which language can be twisted is worrisome, and the fact that our minds accept these perverse games so docilely is no less cause for concern.
Octavio Paz
#43. Two bodies face to face
Are at times two waves
And the night is an ocean.
Two bodies face to face
Are sometimes two stones
And the night a desert.
Octavio Paz
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism.
Octavio Paz
#49. When we learn to speak, we learn to translate.
Octavio Paz
#50. Life is other, always there,
further off, beyond you and
beyond me, always on the horizon,
life which unlives us and makes us strangers,
that invents our face and wears it away
Octavio Paz
#51. The Mexican succumbs very easily to sentimental effusions, and therefore he shuns them.
Octavio Paz
#52. 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
#53. I went to the little window and inhaled the country air. One could hear the breathing of the night, feminine, enormous.
("The Blue Bouquet")
Octavio Paz
#54. Poetry is not truth, it is the resurrection of presences.
Octavio Paz
#55. Like a mountain path that ends at a cliff
I travel along the edge of your thoughts,
and my shadow falls from your white forehead,
my shadow shatters, and I gather the pieces
and go with no body, groping my way
Octavio Paz
#57. Without democracy freedom is a chimera
Octavio Paz
#58. By suppressing differences and peculiarities, by eliminating different civilizations and cultures, progress weakens life and favors death
Octavio Paz
#59. 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
#60. Walt Whitman is the only great modern poet who does not seem to experience discord when he faces his world. Not even solitude - his monologue is a universal chorus.
Octavio Paz
#61. 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
#62. We twentieth-century Mexicans, even those of pure Indian descent, look on the pre-Columbian world as a world on the other side, not only distant in time but across the cultural divide.
Octavio Paz
#63. 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
#64. The purpose of poetry is to restore to mankind the possibility to wonder.
Octavio Paz
#65. Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society.
Octavio Paz
#66. The ideal of a single civilization for everyone, implicit in the cult of progress and technique, impoverishes and mutilates us
Octavio Paz
#67. 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
#68. All is visible and all elusive,
all is near and can't be touched.
Octavio Paz
#69. 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
#71. For every language that becomes extinct, an image of man disappears.
Octavio Paz
#72. For a man of my generation, our century has been a long intellectual and political struggle in favor of freedom.
Octavio Paz
#73. Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone.
Octavio Paz
#74. When hypocrisy is a character trait, it also affects one's thinking, because it consists in the negation of all the aspects of reality that one finds disagreeable, irrational or repugnant.
Octavio Paz
#75. No one is alone, and each change here brings about another change there.
Octavio Paz
#76. Beyond myself, somewhere, I wait for my arrival.
Octavio Paz
#77. 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
#78. Surrealism is not a poetry but a poetics, and even more, and more decisively, a world vision.
Octavio Paz
#79. The Bridge
Between now and now,
between I am and you are,
the word bridge.
Entering it
you enter yourself:
the world connects
and closes like a ring.
From one bank to another,
there is always
a body stretched:
a rainbow.
I'll sleep beneath its arches.
Octavio Paz
#81. Progress has peopled history with the marvels and monsters of technology but it has depopulated the life of man. It has given us more things but not more being.
Octavio Paz
#82. Poetry, whatever the manifest content of the poem, is always a violation of the rationalism and morality of bourgeois society.
Octavio Paz
#83. 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
#84. Changes are inseparable from democracy. To defend democracy is to defend the possibility of change; in turn, changes alone can strengthen democracy.
Octavio Paz
#85. 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
#87. Coda
Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world.
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable.
To learn to see.
Your glance scattered seeds.
It planted a tree.
I talk
because you shake its leaves.
Octavio Paz
#88. 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
#89. The characteristic feature of modernity is criticism: what is new is set over and against what is old, and it is this constant contrast that constitutes the continuity of tradition.
Octavio Paz
#90. 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
#91. 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.
Octavio Paz
#92. In order for sensation to accede to the objectivity of things, it must itself be changed into a thing. The agent of change is language: the sensations are turned into verbal objects.
Octavio Paz
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. Each time we try to express ourselves we have to break with ourselves.
Octavio Paz
#97. As it defines itself, every society defines other societies. That definition almost always takes the form of a condemnation: the 'other' is the barbarian.
Octavio Paz
#98. Any reflection about poetry should begin, or end, with this question: who and how many read poetry books?
Octavio Paz
#100. The sound of water is worth more than all the poets' words.
Octavio Paz
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
