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.
Love is born at first sight; the friendship of a frequent and lengthy exchange.
Deserve your dream.
To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears.
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."
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.
My body, plowed by your body, will turn into a field where one is sown and a hundred reaped.
What sets worlds in motion is the interplay of differences, their attractions and repulsions. Life is plurality, death is uniformity. By suppressing differences and pecularities, by eliminating different civilizations and cultures, progress weakens life and favors death. The ideal of a single civilization for everyone, implicit in the cult of progress and technique, impoverishes and mutilates us. Every view of the world that becomes extinct, every culture that disappears, diminishes a possibility of life
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 an attempt at penetrating another being, but it can only succeed if the surrender is mutual.
