More Quotes by Octavio Paz
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.
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.
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.
To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears.
Self-discovery is above all the realization that we are alone.
We must cultivate and defend particularity, individuality, and irregularity-life. Human beings do not have a future in the collectivism of bureaucratic states or in the mass society created by capitalism. Every system, by virtue as much of its abstract nature as of its pretension to totality, is the enemy of life. As a forgotten Spanish poet, José Moreno Villa, put it with melancholy wit: "I have discovered in symmetry the root of much iniquity."
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.
Humankind is never what he is but the self he seeks.
The purpose of poetry is to restore to mankind the possibility to wonder.
The world is born when two people kiss
