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.
The purpose of poetry is to restore to mankind the possibility to wonder.
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."
Love is not a desire for beauty; it is a yearning for completion.
Eroticism is first and foremost a thirst for otherness. And the supernatural is the supreme otherness. This is perhaps the most noble aim of poetry, to attach ourselves to the world around us, to turn desire into love, to embrace, finally what always evades us, what is beyond, but what is always there – the unspoken, the spirit, the soul.
Reality is a staircase going neither up nor down, we don't move; today is today, always is today.
Love is born at first sight; the friendship of a frequent and lengthy exchange.
My body, plowed by your body, will turn into a field where one is sown and a hundred reaped.
Love is an attempt at penetrating another being, but it can only succeed if the surrender is mutual.
Every view of the world that becomes extinct, every culture that disappears, diminishes a possibility of life
