More Quotes by Octavio Paz
Beyond myself, somewhere, I wait for my arrival.
To love is to battle, to open doors, to cease to be a ghost with a number forever in chains, forever condemned by a faceless master; the world changes if two look at each other and see.
Love is the revelation of the other person's freedom.
The universe unfolds in the body, which is its mirror and its creature.
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.
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.
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.
Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone.
Poetry is not truth, it is the resurrection of presences.
There is nothing sacred or untouchable except the freedom to think. Without criticism, that is to say, without rigor and experimentation, there is no science, without criticism there is no art or literature. I would also say that without criticism there is no healthy society.
