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Octavio Paz


Mexican
March 31, 1914
Poet
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Deserve your dream.


Octavio Paz
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Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society.


Octavio Paz
Tags: Society You Know
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Man, it seems to me, is not in history: he is history.


Octavio Paz
Tags: History Me He
dolomites mountains italy
Perhaps things are not things but words: metaphors, words for other things.


Octavio Paz
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The Mexican succumbs very easily to sentimental effusions, and therefore he shuns them.


Octavio Paz
Tags: Very Them He
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Wisdom lies neither in fixity nor in change, but in the dialectic between the two.


Octavio Paz
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In antiquity, a woman might be an object of worship or desire, but never of love.


Octavio Paz
Tags: Love Never Woman
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To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears.


Octavio Paz
Tags: Our See Read
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Love is an attempt at penetrating another being, but it can only succeed if the surrender is mutual.


Octavio Paz
Tags: Love Being Only
Wisdom lies neither in fixity nor in change, but in the dialectic between the two. A constant coming and going: wisdom lies in the momentary.
Octavio Paz
Tags: Change Going Two
Human writing reflects that of the universe; it is its translation, but also its metaphor: it says something totally different, and it says the same thing.
Octavio Paz
Self-discovery is above all the realization that we are alone: it is the opening of an impalpable, transparent wall - that of our consciousness - between the world and ourselves.
Octavio Paz
Tags: Alone Our World
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
In order for sensation to accede to the objectivity of things, it must itself be changed into a thing. The agent of change is language: the sensations are turned into verbal objects.
Octavio Paz
Walt Whitman is the only great modern poet who does not seem to experience discord when he faces his world. Not even solitude - his monologue is a universal chorus.
Octavio Paz
The American War of Independence is the expulsion of the intrusive elements, alien to the American essence. If American reality is the reinvention of itself, whatever is found in any way irreducible or unassimilable is not American.
Octavio Paz
For the Chinese, the Greeks, the Mayans, or the Egyptians, nature was a living totality, a creative being. For this reason, art, according to Aristotle, is imitation; the poet imitates the creative gesture of nature.
Octavio Paz
Tags: Nature Being Art
An understanding of Sor Juana's work must include an understanding of the prohibitions her work confronts. Her speech leads us to what cannot be said, what cannot be said to an orthodoxy, the orthodoxy to a tribunal, and the tribunal to a sentence.
Octavio Paz
Tags: Work Us Must
The minority of Mexicans who are aware of their own selves do not make up a closed or unchanging class. They are the only active group, in comparison with the Indian-Spanish inertia of the rest, and ever day they are shaping the country more and more into their own image.
Octavio Paz
Tags: Who More Up
Technology is neutral and sterile. Now, technology is the nature of modern man; it is our environment and our horizon. Of course, every work of man is a negation of nature, but at the same time, it is a bridge between nature and us. Technology changes nature in a more radical and decisive manner: it throws it out.
Octavio Paz
Tags: Time Work Nature