Octavio Paz quotes - page 2

Octavio Paz was a Mexican poet, essayist, and diplomat, celebrated as one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. His work explores themes of identity, solitude, and the complexities of Mexican culture. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature for his profound impact on world poetry and thought. Here are 93 of his quotes:

Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone, and the only one who seeks out another.

Octavio Paz

To love is to undress our names.

Octavio Paz

When we learn to speak, we learn to translate.

Octavio Paz

I travel through your waist as through a river, I voyage your body as through a grove going, as by a footpath going up a mountain and suddenly coming upon a steep ravine I go the straitened way of your keen thoughts break through to daylight upon your white forehead and there my spirit flings itself down, is shattered now I collect my fragments one by one and go on, bodiless, searching, in the dark.... you take on the likeness of a tree, a cloud, you are all birds and now you are a star, now you resemble the sharp edge of a sword and now the executioner's bowl of blood, the encroaching ivy that over grows and then roots out the soul and divides it from itself.

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

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

The world stretches out before me, the vast world of the big, the little, and the medium.

Octavio Paz

a human being is never what he is but the self he seeks.

Octavio Paz

The idea of modernity is beginning to lose its vitality. It is losing it because modernity is no longer a critical attitude but an accepted, codified convention.

Octavio Paz

When hypocrisy is a character trait, it also affects one's thinking, because it consists in the negation of all the aspects of reality that one finds disagreeable, irrational or repugnant.

Octavio Paz

The truth is that the history of Mexico is a history in the image of its geography: abrupt and tortuous. Each historical period is like a plateau surrounded by tall mountains and separated from the other plateaus by precipices and divides.

Octavio Paz

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.

Octavio Paz

Without this end that constantly eludes us we would not journey forth, nor would there be any paths. But the end is the refutation and the condemnation of the path: at the end the path dissolves, the meeting fades away to nothingness. And the end - it too fades away to nothingness.

Octavio Paz

I know the mechanism of the trap of morality and the drowsiness of certain words. I have lost faith in all those constructions of stone, ideas, ciphers. I quit. I no longer defend this broken tower. And, in silence, I await the event.

Octavio Paz

No one hangs himself by the rope of a physical law. The equations fall tirelessly into themselves.

Octavio Paz

I too await the coming of my hour, I too exist. No. I quit.

Octavio Paz

A verbal trap; after the end there is nothing, since if there were something, the end would not be the end. Nonetheless, we are always setting forth to meet ... even though we know that there is nothing, or no one, awaiting us.

Octavio Paz

Oh fountain of blood, forever inexhaustible! Life will be a knife, a gray and agile and cutting and exact and arbitrary blade that falls and slashes and divides. To crack, to claw, to quarter, the verbs that move with giant steps against us!

Octavio Paz

No. I renounce my ration card, my I.D., my birth certificate, voter's registration, passport, code number, countersign, credentials, safe conduct pass, insignia, tattoo, brand.

Octavio Paz

It is not the sword that shines in the confusion of what will be. It is not the saber, but fear and the whip. I speak of what is already among us.

Octavio Paz

We can now understand the true reason for their condemnation and its severity. The authorities aren't suppressing a reprehensible practice or a crime. They are suppressing dissidence. ... Prohibition is a battle against a contagion of the spirit - against an opinion.

Octavio Paz

I begin all over again: if it does not make sense to say that fixity is always momentary, the same may not be true if I say that it never is.

Octavio Paz