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Octavio Paz Quotes
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Our century has been terrible—one of the saddest in universal history—but our lives have always been more or less the same. Private lives are not historical.
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I am very fond of fireworks. They were a part of my childhood. There was a part of the town where the artisans were all masters of the great art of fireworks. They were famous all over Mexico.
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I fought against Nazi totalitarianism and the Soviet dictatorship. I don't regret either struggle in the slightest
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Two opposing forces inhabit the poem: one of elevation or up-rooting, which pulls the word from the language: the other of gravity, which makes it return. The poem is an original and unique creation, but it is also reading and recitation: participation. The poet creates it; the people, by recitation, re-create it. Poet and reader are two moments of a single reality.
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The whole motley confusion of acts, omissions, regrets and hopes which is the life of each one of us finds in death, not meaning or explanation, but an end.
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Drugs are nihilistic: they undermine all values and radically overturn all our ideas about good and evil, what is just and what is unjust, what is permitted and what is forbidden.
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Revolt is the violence of an entire people; rebellion the unruliness of an individual or an uprising by a minority; both are spontaneous and blind. Revolution is both planned and spontaneous, a science and an art.
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It may seem paradoxical to say that we have been expelled from the present, but it is a feeling we have all had at some moment. Some of us experienced it first as a condemnation, later transformed into consciousness and action. The search for the present is neither the pursuit of an earthly paradise nor that of a timeless eternity: it is the search for a real reality.
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Each time we try to express ourselves we have to break with ourselves.
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By diminishing the value of silence, publicity has also diminished that of language. The two are inseparable: knowing how to speak has always meant knowing how to keep silent, knowing that there are times when one should say nothing.
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What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism.
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If each of my words were a drop of water, you would see through them and glimpse what I feel: gratitude, acknowledgement.
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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.
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Art is what remains of religion: the dance above the yawning abyss.
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Surrealism is not a school of poetry but a movement of liberation... A way of rediscovering the language of innocence, a renewal of the primordial pact, poetry is the basic text, the foundation of the human order. Surrealism is revolutionary because it is a return to the beginning of all beginnings.
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Life is not historical, but something more like nature.
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The supreme value is not the future but the present. The future is a deceitful time that always says to us, "Not yet," and thus denies us. The future is not the time of love: what man truly wants he wants now. Whoever builds a house for future happiness builds a prison for the present.
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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.
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Self-discovery is above all the realization that we are alone.
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My steps along this street Resound
in another street In which
I hear my steps Passing along this street
In which
Only the mist is real.
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Touched by poetry, language is more fully language and at the same time is no longer language: it is a poem.
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The first deaths will barely swell the daily count, and no one in the statistics bureau will notice that extra zero. But after a while everyone will begin to look at each other and ask: what's happening? Because for months doors and windows are going to rattle, furniture and trees will creak.
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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.
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The absolutes the eternities Their outlying districts Are not my theme I am hungry for life and for death also I know what I know and I write it.
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Would it not be true to say that North Americans prefer to use reality rather than to know it?
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Quote of the day
Now if the harvest is over, And the world cold, Give me the bonus of laughter, As I lose hold.
John Betjeman
Octavio Paz
Creative Commons
Born:
March 31, 1914
Died:
April 19, 1998
(aged 84)
Bio:
Octavio Paz Lozano was a Mexican poet-diplomat and writer. He is considered one of the most influential writers of the 20th century and one of the greatest Hispanic poets of all time.
Known for:
The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950)
Piedra de Sol (1957)
In light of India (1998)
The Double Flame (1993)
Most used words:
time
man
change
poetry
love
alone
language
turn
transition
fixity
body
path
human
future
nature
Octavio Paz on Wikipedia
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