Octavio Paz Quotes

73 Sourced Quotes

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.

Octavio Paz
The world changes if two, dizzy and entwined, fall on the grass

Octavio Paz
Art is what remains of religion: the dance above the yawning abyss.

Octavio Paz
Would it not be true to say that North Americans prefer to use reality rather than to know it?

Octavio Paz
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.

Octavio Paz
Self-discovery is above all the realization that we are alone.

Octavio Paz
To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears.

Octavio Paz
It is the Revolution, the magical word, the word that is going to change everything, that is going to bring us immense delight and a quick death.

Octavio Paz
A crystal willow, a poplar of water, a tall fountain the wind arches over, a tree deep-rooted yet dancing still, a course of a river that turns, moves on, doubles back, and comes full circle, forever arriving

Octavio Paz
We are condemned to kill time:
Thus we die
bit by bit

Octavio Paz
No one behind, no one ahead. The path the ancients cleared has closed. And the other path, everyone's path, easy and wide, goes nowhere. I am alone and find my way.

Octavio Paz
Today we all speak, if not the same tongue, the same universal language. There is no one center, and time has lost its former coherence: East and West, yesterday and tomorrow exist as a confused jumble in each one of us. Different times and different spaces are combined in a here and now that is everywhere at once.

Octavio Paz
And to fill all these white pages that are left for me with the same monotonous question: at what hour do the hours end?

Octavio Paz
Images, memories, fragmentary shapes and forms — all those sensations, visions, half-thoughts that appear and disappear in the wink of an eye, as one sets forth to meet…. The path also disappears as I think of it, as I say it.

Octavio Paz
Cubism had been an analysis of the object and an attempt to put it before us in its totality; both as analysis and as synthesis, it was a criticism of appearance. Surrealism transmuted the object, and suddenly a canvas became an apparition: a new figuration, a real transfiguration.

Octavio Paz
Enormous and solid but swaying, beaten by the wind but chained, murmur of a million leaves against my window. Riot of trees, surge of dark green sounds. The grove, suddenly still, is a web of fronds and branches.

Octavio Paz
I fought against Nazi totalitarianism and the Soviet dictatorship. I don't regret either struggle in the slightest

Octavio Paz
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.

Octavio Paz
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.

Octavio Paz
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.

Octavio Paz
My body, plowed by your body, will turn into a field where one is sown and a hundred reaped.

Octavio Paz
History is our landscape or setting and we live through it. But the real drama, the real comedy also, is within us, and I think we can say the same for someone of the fifth century or for someone of a future century.

Octavio Paz
Life is not historical, but something more like nature.

Octavio Paz