More Quotes by Octavio Paz
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 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.
Humankind is never what he is but the self he seeks.
The purpose of poetry is to restore to mankind the possibility to wonder.
It is always difficult to give oneself up; few persons anywhere ever succeed in doing so, and even fewer transcend the possessive stage to know love for what it actually is: a perpetual discovery, and immersion in the waters of reality, an unending re-creation.
By suppressing differences and peculiarities, by eliminating different civilizations and cultures, progress weakens life and favors death
To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears.
Love is the revelation of the other person's freedom.
The universe unfolds in the body, which is its mirror and its creature.
The beloved is already in our being, as thirst and "otherness." Being is eroticism. Inspiration is that strange voice that takes man out of himself to be every thing that he is, everything that he desires; another body, another being. Beyond, outside of me, in the green and gold thicket, among the tremulous branches, sings the unknown. It calls to me.
