Octavio Paz Quotes

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Octavio Paz

Profession : Poet

Birth : March 31, 1914

Deserve your dream.

Octavio Paz

Wisdom lies neither in fixity nor in change, but in the dialectic between the two. A constant coming and going: wisdom lies in the momentary.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Octavio Paz

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

Self-discovery is above all the realization that we are alone: it is the opening of an impalpable, transparent wall - that of our consciousness - between the world and ourselves.

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

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

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

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

Social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings.

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

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

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

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

Octavio Paz

Surrealism is not a poetry but a poetics, and even more, and more decisively, a world vision.

Octavio Paz