Octavio Paz Quotes - Page 3

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.

listen to me as one listens to the rain, the years go by, the moments return, do you hear the footsteps in the next room? not here, not there: you hear them in another time that is now, listen to the footsteps of time, inventor of places with no weight, nowhere, listen to the rain running over the terrace, the night is now more night in the grove, lightning has nestled among the leaves, a restless garden adrift-go in, your shadow covers this page.

Wisdom lies neither in fixity nor in change, but in the dialectic between the two.

When we learn to speak, we learn to translate.

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

Poetry, in the past, was the center of our society, but with modernity it has retreated to the outskirts. I think the exile of poetry is also the exile of the best of humankind.

If each of my words were a drop of water, you would see through them and glimpse what I feel: gratitude, acknowledgement.

We pursue modernity in her incessant metamorphoses yet we never manage to trap her. She always escapes: each encounter ends in flight. We embrace her and she disappears immediately: it was just a little air. It is the instant, that bird that is everywhere and nowhere. We want to trap it alive but it flaps its wings and vanishes in the form of a handful of syllables. We are left empty-handed. Then the doors of perception open slightly and the other time appears, the real one we were searching for without knowing it: the present, the presence.

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.

Contemporary man has rationalized the myths, but he has not been able to destroy them.

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.

Watching I watch myself, what I see is my creation as though entering through my eyes perception is conception into an eye more crystal clear water of thoughts, what I watch watches me, I am the creation of what I see

Images, memories, fragmentary shapes and forms all those sensations, visions, half-thoughts that appear and disappear in the wink of an eye, as one sets forth to meet.... The path also disappears as I think of it, as I say it.

What sets worlds in motion is the interplay of differences, their attractions and repulsions; life is plurality, death is uniformity.

The woman who died night after night and her dying was a long goodbye, a train that never left.

If society abolishes poetry it commits spiritual suicide.

Loving means getting rid of names.

It may seem paradoxical to say that we have been expelled from the present, but it is a feeling we have all had at some moment. Some of us experienced it first as a condemnation, later transformed into consciousness and action. The search for the present is neither the pursuit of an earthly paradise nor that of a timeless eternity: it is the search for a real reality.

I thought that the world was a vast system of signs, a conversation between giant beings. My actions, the cricket's saw, the star's blink, were nothing but pauses and syllables, scattered phrases from that dialogue. What word could it be, of which I was only a syllable? Who speaks the word? To whom is it spoken?

Grace is gratuitous; it is a gift.

What characterizes a poem is its necessary dependence on words as much as its struggle to transcend them.

There can be no society without poetry, but society can never be realized as poetry, it is never poetic. Sometimes the two terms seek to break apart. They cannot.

Enormous and solid but swaying, beaten by the wind but chained, murmur of a million leaves against my window. Riot of trees, surge of dark green sounds. The grove, suddenly still, is a web of fronds and branches.

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.

The ideal of a single civilization for everyone, implicit in the cult of progress and technique, impoverishes and mutilates us