Octavio Paz Quotes

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Octavio Paz

Profession : Poet

Birth : March 31, 1914

The characteristic feature of modernity is criticism: what is new is set over and against what is old, and it is this constant contrast that constitutes the continuity of tradition.

Octavio Paz

Art for Duchamp, all the arts, obey the same law: meta-irony is inherent in their very spirit. It is an irony that destroys its own negation and, hence, returns in the affirmative.

Octavio Paz

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

Poetry is the experience of liberty. The poet risks himself, chances all on the poem's all with each verse he writes.

Octavio Paz

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

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 object of poetic activity is essentially language: whatever his beliefs and convictions, the poet is more concerned with words than with what these words designate.

Octavio Paz

The Mexican succumbs very easily to sentimental effusions, and therefore he shuns them.

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

All poems say the same thing, and each poem is unique. Each part reproduces the others, and each part is different.

Octavio Paz

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

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

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

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

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

Octavio Paz

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

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

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

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

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