01UndatedContemporary man has rationalized the myths but he has not been able to destroy them.Octavio Paz / quote ↗
02UndatedReality is a staircase going neither up nor down we don't move today is today always is today.Octavio Paz / quote ↗
03UndatedSolitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone.Octavio Paz / quote ↗
04UndatedThe 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 / quote ↗
05UndatedA 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 / quote ↗
06UndatedLiterature 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 / quote ↗
07UndatedThe American War of Independence is the expulsion of the intrusive elements, alien to the American essence. If American reality is the reinvention of itself, whatever is found in any way irreducible or unassimilable is not American.Octavio Paz / quote ↗
08UndatedI think we all have our own personality, unique and distinctive, and at the same time, I think that our own unique and distinctive personality blends with the wind, with the footsteps in the street, with the noises around the corner, and with the silence of memory, which is the great producer of ghosts.Octavio Paz / quote ↗
09UndatedMan 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 / quote ↗
10UndatedArt is an invention of aesthetics, which in turn is an invention of philosophers... What we call art is a game.Octavio Paz / quote ↗
11UndatedTechnology is neutral and sterile. Now, technology is the nature of modern man; it is our environment and our horizon. Of course, every work of man is a negation of nature, but at the same time, it is a bridge between nature and us. Technology changes nature in a more radical and decisive manner: it throws it out.Octavio Paz / quote ↗
13UndatedWisdom lies neither in fixity nor in change, but in the dialectic between the two.Octavio Paz / quote ↗
14UndatedWisdom lies neither in fixity nor in change, but in the dialectic between the two. A constant coming and going: wisdom lies in the momentary.Octavio Paz / quote ↗
15UndatedTo read a poem is to hear it with our eyes to hear it is to see it with our ears.Octavio Paz / quote ↗
16UndatedSurrealism is not a poetry but a poetics, and even more, and more decisively, a world vision.Octavio Paz / quote ↗
17UndatedPoetry is the experience of liberty. The poet risks himself, chances all on the poem's all with each verse he writes.Octavio Paz / quote ↗
18UndatedPoetry is not a genre in harmony with the modern world; its innermost nature is hostile or indifferent to the dogmas of modern times, progress and the cult of the future.Octavio Paz / quote ↗
19UndatedPoetry, whatever the manifest content of the poem, is always a violation of the rationalism and morality of bourgeois society.Octavio Paz / quote ↗
20UndatedAny reflection about poetry should begin, or end, with this question: who and how many read poetry books?Octavio Paz / quote ↗
21UndatedSelf-discovery is above all the realization that we are alone: it is the opening of an impalpable, transparent wall - that of our consciousness - between the world and ourselves.Octavio Paz / quote ↗
22UndatedNo one is alone, and each change here brings about another change there.Octavio Paz / quote ↗
