More Quotes by Octavio Paz
For every language that becomes extinct, an image of man disappears.
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.
Love is the revelation of the other person's freedom.
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.
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.
Distraction is our habitual state. Not the distraction of the person who withdraws from the world in order to shut himself up in the secret and ever-changing land of his fantasy, but the distraction of the person who is always outside himself, lost in the trivial, senseless, turmoil of everyday life.
My body, plowed by your body, will turn into a field where one is sown and a hundred reaped.
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.
Reality is a staircase going neither up nor down, we don't move; today is today, always is today.
Light is time thinking about itself.
