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When a society decays, it is language that is first to become gangrenous. As a result, social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings

Octavio Paz

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Octavio Paz
Age: 84 †
Born: 1914
Born: March 31
Died: 1998
Died: April 2
Diplomat
Essayist
Lyricist
Philosopher
Poet
Politician
Translator
Writer
Mexico City
Mexico
Octavio Paz Lozano
Social
Grammar
Become
Decay
Firsts
Begins
First
Criticism
Result
Results
Decays
Society
Establishing
Language
Meanings

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Contemporary man has rationalized the myths, but he has not been able to destroy them.
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Changes are inseparable from democracy. To defend democracy is to defend the possibility of change in turn, changes alone can strengthen democracy.
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Tradition is no longer a continuity but a series of sharp breaks. The modern tradition is the tradition of revolt.
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Love is the revelation of the other person's freedom.
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The universe unfolds in the body, which is its mirror and its creature.
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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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Death is the mother of forms.
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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.
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What is art? A violet. Is that all? An artistic style is a living entity, a continuous process of invention. It can never be imposed from without born of the profoundest tendencies within a society, its direction is to a certain extent unpredictable, in much the same way as the eventual configuration of a tree's branches.
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Solitude lies at the lowest depth of the human condition. Man is the only being who feels himself to be alone and the only one who is searching for the Other.
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Art is what remains of religion: the dance above the yawning abyss.
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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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Light is time thinking about itself.
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Believing ourselves to be possessors of absolute truth degrades us: we regard every person whose way of thinking is different from ours as a monster and a threat and by so doing turn our own selves into monsters and threats to our fellows.
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Deserve your dream.
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Reality is a staircase going neither up nor down, we don't move today is today, always is today.
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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.
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A civilization that denies death ends by denying life.
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To love is to battle, to open doors, to cease to be a ghost with a number forever in chains, forever condemned by a faceless master the world changes if two look at each other and see.
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Solitude is the profoundest fact
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