More Quotes by Octavio Paz
For every language that becomes extinct, an image of man disappears.
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.
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.
Love is an attempt at penetrating another being, but it can only succeed if the surrender is mutual.
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."
Every moment is nothing without end.
My body, plowed by your body, will turn into a field where one is sown and a hundred reaped.
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.
To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears.
Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone.
