More Quotes by Octavio Paz
Beyond happiness or unhappiness, though it is both things, love is intensity; it does not give us eternity but life, that second in which the doors of time and space open just a crack: here is there and now is always.
Self-discovery is above all the realization that we are alone.
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.
Every view of the world that becomes extinct, every culture that disappears, diminishes a possibility of life
Poetry is not truth, it is the resurrection of presences.
Love is born at first sight; the friendship of a frequent and lengthy exchange.
Every moment is nothing without end.
To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears.
A civilization that denies death ends by denying life.
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."
