More Quotes by Octavio Paz
My body, plowed by your body, will turn into a field where one is sown and a hundred reaped.
I don't believe that there are dangerous writers: the danger of certain books is not in the books themselves but in the passions of their readers.
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.
Poetry is not truth, it is the resurrection of presences.
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.
What sets worlds in motion is the interplay of differences, their attractions and repulsions. Life is plurality, death is uniformity. By suppressing differences and pecularities, by eliminating different civilizations and cultures, progress weakens life and favors death. The ideal of a single civilization for everyone, implicit in the cult of progress and technique, impoverishes and mutilates us. Every view of the world that becomes extinct, every culture that disappears, diminishes a possibility of life
To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears.
Love is not a desire for beauty; it is a yearning for completion.
Every moment is nothing without end.
Modern man likes to pretend that his thinking is wide-awake. But this wide-awake thinking has led us into the mazes of a nightmare in which the torture chambers are endlessly repeated in the mirrors of reason.
