Top 100 Octavio Quotes
#1. Looks like a hit on a local loan shark," I say. "A guy by the name of Octavio
J. Mark Bertrand
#2. I fell in love with Ryan, you got jealous, then I fell out of love with him because he seemed needy, you tied me up, I got half a chubby because it reminded me of Octavio, and now you have a date with Ryan. Oops. I mean Todd. Gosh, I'm beat. What a long night.
T.J. Klune
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. I do not know if the story repeats itself: I only know that people change little
Octavio Paz
#6. We are condemned to kill time, thus we die bit by bit.
Octavio Paz
#7. The truth is that the history of Mexico is a history in the image of its geography: abrupt and tortuous. Each historical period is like a plateau surrounded by tall mountains and separated from the other plateaus by precipices and divides.
Octavio Paz
#8. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. The woman who died night after night
and her dying was a long goodbye,
a train that never left.
Octavio Paz
#13. The presence and the present of America are a future; our continent is, by its nature, the land which does not exist on its own, but as something which is created and invented.
Octavio Paz
#14. 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
#15. Love is an attempt to penetrate another being, but it can only be realized if the surrender is mutual.
Octavio Paz
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. All of us, at some moment, have had a vision of our existence as something unique, untransferable and very precious. This revelation almost always takes place during adolescence.
Octavio Paz
#19. 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
#20. A work survives its readers; after a hundred or two hundred years, it is read by new readers who impose on it new modes of reading and interpretation. The work survives because of these interpretations, which are, in fact, resurrections: without them, there would be no work.
Octavio Paz
#21. Wisdom lies neither in fixity nor in change, but in the dialectic between the two.
Octavio Paz
#22. If each of my words were a drop of water, you would see through them and glimpse what I feel: gratitude, acknowledgement.
Octavio Paz
#23. 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
#24. Poets have the gift to speak for others, Vasko Popa had the very rare quality of hearing the others.
Octavio Paz
#25. A saint speaks with God or with himself, two forms of silence.
Octavio Paz
#26. Perhaps things are not things but words: metaphors, words for other things.
Octavio Paz
#27. Contemporary man has rationalized the myths, but he has not been able to destroy them.
Octavio Paz
#28. To love is to battle, to open doors. The world changes if two can look at each other and see.
Octavio Paz
#29. 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
#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
#31. Art is an invention of aesthetics, which in turn is an invention of philosophers ... What we call art is a game.
Octavio Paz
#32. Power immobilizes; it freezes with a single gesture-grandiose, terrible, theatrical, or finally, simply monotonous-the variety which is life.
Octavio Paz
#33. Love is an attempt at penetrating another being, but it can only succeed if the surrender is mutual.
Octavio Paz
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. The past reappears because it is a hidden present.
Octavio Paz
#37. A human being is never what he is but the self he seeks.
Octavio Paz
#38. 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
#39. All poems say the same thing, and each poem is unique. Each part reproduces the others, and each part is different.
Octavio Paz
#40. To live is also to think, and sometimes to cross that border beyond which feeling and thinking become one: poetry. Meanwhile,
Octavio Paz
#41. 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
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. A flower without a stem, is beauty waiting to die. A heart without love, is a tear waiting to cry.
Octavio Paz
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. A civilization that denies death ends by denying life.
Octavio Paz
#49. The universe unfolds in the body, which is its mirror and its creature.
Octavio Paz
#51. Poetry is the experience of liberty. The poet risks himself, chances all on the poem's all with each verse he writes.
Octavio Paz
#52. 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
#53. To be a great painter means to be a great poet: someone who transcends the limits of his language.
Octavio Paz
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. Reality is a staircase going neither up nor down, we don't move; today is today, always is today.
Octavio Paz
#61. Art is what remains of religion: the dance above the yawning abyss.
Octavio Paz
#62. 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
#63. What characterizes a poem is its necessary dependence on words as much as its struggle to transcend them.
Octavio Paz
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. In antiquity, a woman might be an object of worship or desire, but never of love.
Octavio Paz
#68. 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
#69. Love is born at first sight; the friendship of a frequent and lengthy exchange.
Octavio Paz
#71. 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
#73. 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
#74. Even though the society that Marx foresaw is far from being an historical reality, Marxism has penetrated so deeply in history that we are all Marxists, one way or another, even unknowingly.
Octavio Paz
#75. To become aware of our history is to become aware of our singularity.
Octavio Paz
#76. 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
#77. Man, it seems to me, is not in history: he is history.
Octavio Paz
#78. 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
#79. Tradition is no longer a continuity but a series of sharp breaks. The modern tradition is the tradition of revolt.
Octavio Paz
#80. 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
#81. Little by little, not without astonishment, I rediscovered the great names of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, who had been the master thinkers of my grandfather and other Mexican liberals. They did no offer me a doctrine or a catechism: they were and they are a source, an inspiration.
Octavio Paz
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. 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
#89. 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
#91. What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism.
Octavio Paz
#92. 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.
Octavio Paz
#93. When we learn to speak, we learn to translate.
Octavio Paz
#94. 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
#95. Is not really a system of painting but a method of internal investigation. It is not the philosophy of painting but painting as philosophy.
Octavio Paz
#96. The world is born when two people kiss
Octavio Paz
#97. The Mexican succumbs very easily to sentimental effusions, and therefore he shuns them.
Octavio Paz
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. Poetry is not truth, it is the resurrection of presences.
Octavio Paz
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