Octavio Paz Quotes

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

Beyond myself, somewhere, I wait for my arrival.

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.

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

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

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

Deserve your dream.

A civilization that denies death ends by denying life.

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.

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

Light is time thinking about itself.

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.

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

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.

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

To love is to undress our names.

There is nothing sacred or untouchable except the freedom to think. Without criticism, that is to say, without rigor and experimentation, there is no science, without criticism there is no art or literature. I would also say that without criticism there is no healthy society.

Every moment is nothing without end.

By suppressing differences and peculiarities, by eliminating different civilizations and cultures, progress weakens life and favors death

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

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.

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.

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

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.

The world is born when two people kiss