#Quote
More Quotes by Octavio Paz
A civilization that denies death ends by denying life.
It is always difficult to give oneself up; few persons anywhere ever succeed in doing so, and even fewer transcend the possessive stage to know love for what it actually is: a perpetual discovery, and immersion in the waters of reality, an unending re-creation.
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 view of the world that becomes extinct, every culture that disappears, diminishes a possibility of life
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.
Humankind is never what he is but the self he seeks.
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.
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.
Self-discovery is above all the realization that we are alone.
