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Octavio Paz Quotes - Page 5

All Quotes Art Criticism Culture Desire Feelings Giving Language Lying Poetry Progress Reality Revolution Solitude Values Wall Water
It is the Revolution, the magical word, the word that is going to change everything, that is going to bring us immense delight and a quick death.

It is the Revolution, the magical word, the word that is going to change everything, that is going to bring us immense delight and a quick death.

Octavio Paz
Delight, Revolution, Quick Death
Octavio Paz (1985). “The Labyrinth of Solitude: And the Other Mexico ; Return to the Labyrinth of Solitude ; Mexico and the United States ; The Philanthropic Ogre”, p.148, Grove Press

Power immobilizes; it freezes with a single gesture-grandiose, terrible, theatrical, or finally, simply monotonous-the variety which is life.

Octavio Paz
Power, Gestures, Terrible

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 consecrating things and endowing them with a sort of eternity; museums are our temples, and the objects displayed in them are beyond history. Politics--or more precisely, Revolution--co-opted the other function of religion: changing human beings and society. Art was an asceticism, a spiritual heroism; Revolution was the construction of a universal church.

Octavio Paz
Spiritual, Art, Museums
Octavio Paz (1987). “1904-1912”, San Diego : Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

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

Octavio Paz
Writing, Beggar, Western

Language lies outside of society because it is its foundation; but it also lies within society because that is the only place where it exists and the only place where it develops.

Octavio Paz
Lying, Foundation, Language
Octavio Paz (1973). “Alternating Current”, p.61, Arcade Publishing

Revolt is the violence of an entire people; rebellion the unruliness of an individual or an uprising by a minority; both are spontaneous and blind. Revolution is both planned and spontaneous, a science and an art.

Octavio Paz
Art, Uprising, People
Octavio Paz (1973). “Alternating Current”, p.141, Arcade Publishing

What is art? A violet. Is that all? An artistic style is a living entity, a continuous process of invention. It can never be imposed from without; born of the profoundest tendencies within a society, its direction is to a certain extent unpredictable, in much the same way as the eventual configuration of a tree's branches.

Octavio Paz
Art, Tree, Style

Cubism had been an analysis of the object and an attempt to put it before us in its totality; both as analysis and as synthesis, it was a criticism of appearance. Surrealism transmuted the object, and suddenly a canvas became an apparition: a new figuration, a real transfiguration.

Octavio Paz
Real, Criticism, Analysis
Octavio Paz (1973). “Alternating Current”, p.31, Arcade Publishing

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