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Octavio Paz Quotes

Art is an invention of aesthetics, which in turn is an invention of philosophers... What we call art...

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This is perhaps the most noble aim of poetry, to attach ourselves to the world around us, to turn de...

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The Other Voice: Essays on Modern Poetry

A verbal trap; after the end there is nothing, since if there were something, the end would not be t...

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The Monkey Grammarian

When a society decays, it is language that is first to become gangrenous. As a result, social critic...

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The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings

To reduce poetry to its reflections of historical events and movements would be like reducing the po...

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The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings

Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone...

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The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings

Beyond myself, somewhere, I wait for my arrival.

The Collected Poems

Everything is language.

The Bow and the Lyre: The Poem

At first I couldn't see anything. I fumbled along the cobblestone street. I lit a cigarette. Suddenl...

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I went to the little window and inhaled the country air. One could hear the breathing of the night, ...

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The Blue Bouquet

The blue light of the rising moon fell on the rocks and the scant forest of the taiga, revealing eac...

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The Blue Bouquet

because two bodies, naked and entwined,leap over time, they are invulnerable,nothing can touch them,...

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Sunstone/Piedra De Sol

better the crime,the suicides of lovers, the incest committedby brother and sister like two mirrorsi...

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Sunstone/Piedra De Sol

life is other, always there,further off, beyond you andbeyond me, always on the horizon,life which u...

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Sunstone/Piedra De Sol

After chopping off all the arms that reached out to me; after boarding up all the windows and doors;...

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Selected Poems

There was only one huge world with no back to itA world like a sunOne day it broke into tiny piecesT...

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Selected Poems

Mineral cactai,quicksilver lizards in the adobe walls,the bird that punctures space,thirst, tedium, ...

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A Draft of Shadows and Other Poems

Any reflection about poetry should begin, or end, with this question: who and how many read poetry b...

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Every text is unique and, at the same time, it is the translation of another text. No text is entire...

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Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone...

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I went to the little window and inhaled the country air. One could hear the breathing of the night, ...

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I thought that the world was a vast system of signs, a conversation between giant beings. My actions...

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Poetry, whatever the manifest content of the poem, is always a violation of the rationalism and mora...

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Poetry is not a genre in harmony with the modern world; its innermost nature is hostile or indiffere...

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Poetry is the experience of liberty. The poet risks himself, chances all on the poem's all with each...

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No one is alone, and each change here brings about another change there.

Technology is neutral and sterile. Now, technology is the nature of modern man; it is our environmen...

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Surrealism is not a poetry but a poetics, and even more, and more decisively, a world vision.

Contemporary man has rationalized the myths but he has not been able to destroy them.

The American War of Independence is the expulsion of the intrusive elements, alien to the American e...

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The idea of modernity is beginning to lose its vitality. It is losing it because modernity is no lon...

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CodaPerhaps to love is to learnto walk through this world.To learn to be silentlike the oak and the ...

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I think we all have our own personality, unique and distinctive, and at the same time, I think that ...

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Wisdom lies neither in fixity nor in change, but in the dialectic between the two. A constant coming...

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Wisdom lies neither in fixity nor in change, but in the dialectic between the two.

Man is alone everywhere. But the solitude of the Mexican, under the great stone night of the high pl...

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The object of poetic activity is essentially language: whatever his beliefs & convictions, the poet ...

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Literature is the expression of a feeling of deprivation, a recourse against a sense of something mi...

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Death and birth are solitary experiences. We are born alone and we die alone. When we are expelled f...

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A society is defined as much by how it comes to terms with its past as by its attitude toward the fu...

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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.

Reality is a staircase going neither up nor down we don't move today is today always is today.

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

Self-discovery is above all the realization that we are alone: it is the opening of an impalpable, t...

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When we learn to speak, we learn to translate.

Horror immobolizes us because it is made of contradictory feelings: fear and seduction, repulsion an...

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Octavio Paz

Poet

Born: 1914-03-31

Died: 1998-04-19

Octavio Paz Lozano (31 March 1914 – 19 April 1998) was a poet, writer, diplomat, and winner of the 1990 Nobel Prize in Literature, the first Mexican writer to become a Nobel Laureate.More