More Quotes by Octavio Paz
Each time we try to express ourselves we have to break with ourselves.
A flower without a stem, is beauty waiting to die. A heart without love, is a tear waiting to cry.
Humankind is never what he is but the self he seeks.
The universe unfolds in the body, which is its mirror and its creature.
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 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.
Self-discovery is above all the realization that we are alone.
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.
Love is the revelation of the other person's freedom.
