Top 30 Octavio Paz Poetry Quotes
#1. The purpose of poetry is to restore to mankind the possibility to wonder.
Octavio Paz
#2. Any reflection about poetry should begin, or end, with this question: who and how many read poetry books?
Octavio Paz
#3. Fearlessness in the face of your own ineptitude is a useful tool to have.
Michael Cunningham
#4. 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
#5. Music is about expressing things you can't in everyday life.
Brian Molko
#6. An horrible stillness first invades our ear, And in that silence we the tempest fear.
John Dryden
#7. 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
#8. Verse after verse follows, her voice rising to a crescendo and then falling, only to rise again with a new passage, each echoing the same refrain. I never realized how many verses of the Bible boil down to, I tried to tell you idiots, but no - you wouldn't listen.
Rysa Walker
#9. Poetry, whatever the manifest content of the poem, is always a violation of the rationalism and morality of bourgeois society.
Octavio Paz
#10. Surrealism is not a poetry but a poetics, and even more, and more decisively, a world vision.
Octavio Paz
#11. To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears.
Octavio Paz
#12. How competitive can you be without losing your discipline?
Doc Rivers
#13. I spent many a charming evening talking and playing with Albertine, but none so sweet as when I was watching her sleep.
Marcel Proust
#14. Men are all right for friends, but as soon as you marry them they turn into cranky old fathers, even the wild ones.
Willa Cather
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. Poetry is not truth, it is the resurrection of presences.
Octavio Paz
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. I think musicians have always been drinking and sharing a good wine. It is, I hate to say this, another form of vice.
Tom Araya
#22. Still, I have been no one's enemy but my own. My easy nature, either in drinking or anything else, was always ready to submit to persuasions of profligate companions, who often led me into snares.
John Clare
#23. What characterizes a poem is its necessary dependence on words as much as its struggle to transcend them.
Octavio Paz
#25. 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
#26. Poetry is the experience of liberty. The poet risks himself, chances all on the poem's all with each verse he writes.
Octavio Paz
#27. They were afraid of dieing, but they were even more afraid to show it.
Tim O'Brien
#28. To live is also to think, and sometimes to cross that border beyond which feeling and thinking become one: poetry. Meanwhile,
Octavio Paz
#29. Oh life to live, life already lived,
time that comes back in a swell of sea,
time that recedes without turning its head,
the past is not past, it is still passing by,
flowing silently into the next vanishing moment
Octavio Paz
#30. 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
