Quotes by Octavio Paz
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.
A flower without a stem, is beauty waiting to die. A heart without love, is a tear waiting to cry.
By suppressing differences and peculiarities, by eliminating different civilizations and cultures, progress weakens life and favors death
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.
Reality is a staircase going neither up nor down, we don't move; today is today, always is today.
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.
To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears.
For every language that becomes extinct, an image of man disappears.
Love is not a desire for beauty; it is a yearning for completion.
Because two bodies, naked and entwined, leap over time, they are invulnerable, nothing can touch them, they return to the source. There is no you, no I, no tomorrow, no yesterday, no names, the truth of two in a single body, a single soul, oh total being.
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.
The purpose of poetry is to restore to mankind the possibility to wonder.
Wisdom lies neither in fixity nor in change, but in the dialectic between the two.
Eroticism is first and foremost a thirst for otherness. And the supernatural is the supreme otherness. This is perhaps the most noble aim of poetry, to attach ourselves to the world around us, to turn desire into love, to embrace, finally what always evades us, what is beyond, but what is always there – the unspoken, the spirit, the soul.
Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone.
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 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.