More Quotes by Octavio Paz
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.
Love is not a desire for beauty; it is a yearning for completion.
Reality is a staircase going neither up nor down, we don't move; today is today, always is today.
Deserve your dream.
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.
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.
By suppressing differences and peculiarities, by eliminating different civilizations and cultures, progress weakens life and favors death
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.
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.
A flower without a stem, is beauty waiting to die. A heart without love, is a tear waiting to cry.
