More Quotes by Octavio Paz
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
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."
Deserve your dream.
Self-discovery is above all the realization that we are alone.
A civilization that denies death ends by denying life.
Love is not a desire for beauty; it is a yearning for completion.
Each time we try to express ourselves we have to break with ourselves.
For every language that becomes extinct, an image of man disappears.
The purpose of poetry is to restore to mankind the possibility to wonder.
By suppressing differences and peculiarities, by eliminating different civilizations and cultures, progress weakens life and favors death
