Quotes by Octavio Paz
Deserve your dream.
To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears.
We are condemned to kill time, thus we die bit by bit.
Love is an attempt at penetrating another being, but it can only succeed if the surrender is mutual.
Wisdom lies neither in fixity nor in change, but in the dialectic between the two.
Art is an invention of aesthetics, which in turn is an invention of philosophers... What we call art is a game.
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.
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.
Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone.
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.
Social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings.
What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism.
The religion of art, like the religion of politics, was born from the ruins of Christianity. Art inherited from the old religion the power of ...
Today we all speak, if not the same tongue, the same universal language. There is no one center, and time has lost its former coherence: East and West, yesterday and tomorrow exist as a confused jumble in each one of us. Different times and different spaces are combined in a here and now that is everywhere at once.
A glass pitcher, a wicker basket, a tunic of coarse cotton cloth. Their beauty is inseparable from their function. Handicrafts belong to a world existing before the separation of the useful and the beautiful.
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.
Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society.
