More Quotes by Octavio Paz
To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears.
Poetry is not truth, it is the resurrection of presences.
The American: a titan enamored of progress, a fanatical giant who worships "getting things done" but never asks himself what he is doing nor why he is doing it.
Deserve your dream.
By suppressing differences and peculiarities, by eliminating different civilizations and cultures, progress weakens life and favors death
Every view of the world that becomes extinct, every culture that disappears, diminishes a possibility of life
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.
The beloved is already in our being, as thirst and "otherness." Being is eroticism. Inspiration is that strange voice that takes man out of himself to be every thing that he is, everything that he desires; another body, another being. Beyond, outside of me, in the green and gold thicket, among the tremulous branches, sings the unknown. It calls to me.
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
