Octavio Paz Quotes & Sayings

Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone. — Octavio Paz

Technology is neutral and sterile. Now, technology is the nature of modern man; it is our environment and our horizon. Of course, every work of man is a negation of nature, but at the same time, it is a bridge between nature and us. Technology changes nature in a more radical and decisive manner: it throws it out. — Octavio Paz

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

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

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

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

A saint speaks with God or with himself, two forms of silence. — Octavio Paz

Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society. — 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

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

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. When we emerge, perhaps we will realize that we have been dreaming with our eyes open, and that the dreams of reason are intolerable. And then, perhaps, we will begin to dream once more with our eyes closed. — 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

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

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

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

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

Death is the mother of forms. — Octavio Paz

To be a great painter means to be a great poet: someone who transcends the limits of his language. — Octavio Paz

The world is born when two people kiss — Octavio Paz

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

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

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

Horror immobolizes us because it is made of contradictory feelings: fear and seduction, repulsion and attraction. Horror is a fascination ... Horror is immobility, the great yawn of empty space, the womb and the hole in the earth, the universal Mother and the great garbage heap ... With horror we cannot have recourse to flight or combat, there remains only Adoration or Exorcism. — Octavio Paz

The minority of Mexicans who are aware of their own selves do not make up a closed or unchanging class. They are the only active group, in comparison with the Indian-Spanish inertia of the rest, and ever day they are shaping the country more and more into their own image. — Octavio Paz

Poet: gardener of epitaphs. — Octavio Paz

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

Despite the often illusory nature of essays on the psychology of a nation, it seems to me there is something revealing in the insistence with which a people will question itself during certain periods of its growth. — Octavio Paz

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

A human being is never what he is but the self he seeks. — Octavio Paz

The sound of water is worth more than all the poets' words. — Octavio Paz

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

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

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

What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism. — 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

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

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

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

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

To the poet fated to be a poet, self-expression is as natural and as involuntary as breathing is to us ordinary mortals. — Octavio Paz

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

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

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

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

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

Man, it seems to me, is not in history: he is history. — Octavio Paz

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

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. — 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

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 world stretches before me, the vast world of the big, the little, and the medium. — Octavio Paz

The purpose of poetry is to restore to mankind the possibility to wonder. — Octavio Paz

The woman who died night after night
and her dying was a long goodbye,
a train that never left. — 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

We are condemned to kill time, thus we die bit by bit. — Octavio Paz

Between going and staying the day wavers,
in love with its own transparency.
The circular afternoon is now a bay
where the world in stillness rocks.
All is visible and all elusive,
all is near and can't be touched.
Paper, book, pencil, glass,
rest in the shade of their names.
Time throbbing in my temples repeats
the same unchanging syllable of blood.
The light turns the indifferent wall
into a ghostly theater of reflections.
I find myself in the middle of an eye,
watching myself in its blank stare.
The moment scatters. Motionless,
I stay and go: I am a pause. — 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

Love is born at first sight; the friendship of a frequent and lengthy exchange. — Octavio Paz

He is astonished at the fact of his being, and this astonishment leads to reflection: as he leans over the river of his consciousness, he asks himself if the face that appears there, disfigured by the water, is his own. The singularity of his being, which is pure sensation in children, becomes a problem and a question — Octavio Paz

Reality is a staircase going neither up nor down, we don't move; today is today, always is today. — Octavio Paz

All is visible and all elusive,
all is near and can't be touched. — Octavio Paz

No one is alone, and each change here brings about another change there. — Octavio Paz

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

Reversibility: seeing through opaqueness, not-seeing through transparency. The wooden door and the glass door: two opposite facets of the same idea. This opposition is resolved in an identity: in both cases we look at ourselves looking. Hinge procedure. The question "What do we see?" confronts us with ourselves. — 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

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

To love is to undress our names. — Octavio Paz

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

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

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

History has the cruel reality of a nightmare, and the grandeur of man consists in his making beautiful and lasting works out of the real substance of that nightmare. Or, to put it another way, it consists in transforming the nightmare into vision; in freeing ourselves from the shapeless horror of reality
if only for an instant
by means of creation. — Octavio Paz

Therefore the fiesta is not only an excess, a ritual squandering of the goods painfully accumulated during the rest of the year; it is also a revolt, a sudden immersion in the formless, in pure being. By means of the fiesta society frees itself from the norms it has established. It ridicules its gods, its principles, and its laws: it denies its own self. — 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

The art of the great historic civilizations never impress us as much as an Eskimo harpoon or a mask from the South Pacific. The contact is physical, and the feeling we experience is very much like acute anxiety. Inner or outer space, the world below or beyond, becomes a great weight pressing down upon us. Each work is a solid block of time, time standing still, time more massive than a mountain, despite the fact that it is as intangible as air or thought. The handiwork of primitive peoples reveals the time before time. — Octavio Paz

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

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

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

What sets worlds in motion is the interplay of differences, their attractions and repulsions. Life is plurality, death is uniformity. By suppressing differences and pecularities, by eliminating different civilizations and cultures, progress weakens life and favors death. The ideal of a single civilization for everyone, implicit in the cult of progress and technique, impoverishes and mutilates us. Every view of the world that becomes extinct, every culture that disappears, diminishes a possibility of life — Octavio Paz

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

O love is to battle, if two kiss
the world changes, desires take flesh
thoughts take flesh, wings sprout
on the backs of the slave, the world is real
and tangible, wine is wine, bread
regains its savor, water is water,
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
Piedra de Sol (The Sun Stone), translated by Eliot Weinberger — Octavio Paz

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

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

To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears. — Octavio Paz

Self-discovery is above all the realization that we are alone. — Octavio Paz

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

I think we all have our own personality, unique and distinctive, and at the same time, I think that our own unique and distinctive personality blends with the wind, with the footsteps in the street, with the noises around the corner, and with the silence of memory, which is the great producer of ghosts. — 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

Love is an attempt to penetrate another being, but it can only be realized if the surrender is mutual. — Octavio Paz

Eroticism is, above all else, exclusively human: it is sexuality socialized and transfigured by the imagination and the will of human beings. The first thing that distinguishes eroticism from sexuality is the infinite variety of forms in which it manifests itself. eroticism is invention, constant variation, sex is always the same.
In every erotic encounter there is an invisible and ever-active participant: imagination, desire.Eroticism is first and foremost a thirst for otherness.
Many years ago I wrote: love is a sacrifice without virtue. Today I would say: love is a bet, a wild one, placed on freedom. Not my own: the freedom of the other. — Octavio Paz

Better the crime,
the suicides of lovers, the incest committed
by brother and sister like two mirrors
in love with their likeness, better to eat
the poisoned bread, adultery on a bed
of ashes, ferocious love, the poisonous
vines of delirium, the sodomite who wears
a gob of spit for a rose in his lapel,
better to be stoned in the plaza than to turn
the mill that squeezes out the juice of life,
that turns eternity into empty hours,
minutes into prisons, and time into
copper coins and abstract shit — Octavio Paz

Deserve your dream. — Octavio Paz

To live is also to think, and sometimes to cross that border beyond which feeling and thinking become one: poetry. Meanwhile, — 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

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

Everything is language. — Octavio Paz

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

To become aware of our history is to become aware of our singularity. — Octavio Paz

In antiquity, a woman might be an object of worship or desire, but never of love. — Octavio Paz