Octavio Paz Love Quotes & Sayings

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

A flower without a stem, is beauty waiting to die. A heart without love, is a tear waiting to cry. — 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

To love is to battle, to open doors. The world changes if two can look at each other and see. — Octavio Paz

Love is an attempt at penetrating another being, but it can only succeed if the surrender is mutual. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Love is not a desire for beauty; it is a yearning for completion. — 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

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

To love is to undress our names. — Octavio Paz