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Technology is not an image of the world but a way of operating on reality. The nihilism of technology lies not only in the fact that it is the most perfect expression of the will to power... but also in the fact that it lacks meaning.

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
Fact
Operating
Facts
Image
Reality
Lies
Also
Meaning
Power
Expression
Way
Technology
World
Lying
Nihilism
Perfect
Lacks

More quotes by Octavio Paz

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For every language that becomes extinct, an image of man disappears.
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I thought that the world was a vast system of signs, a conversation between giant beings. My actions, the cricket's saw, the star's blink, were nothing but pauses and syllables, scattered phrases from that dialogue. What word could it be, of which I was only a syllable? Who speaks the word? To whom is it spoken?
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Every moment is nothing without end.
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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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Loving means getting rid of names.
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What characterizes a poem is its necessary dependence on words as much as its struggle to transcend 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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Light is time thinking about itself.
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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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A civilization that denies death ends by denying life.
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The purpose of poetry is to restore to mankind the possibility to wonder.
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Contemporary man has rationalized the myths, but he has not been able to destroy them.
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Whatever is not stone is light
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There can be no society without poetry, but society can never be realized as poetry, it is never poetic. Sometimes the two terms seek to break apart. They cannot.
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To fight evil is to fight ourselves.
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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
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Solitude is the profoundest fact
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Love is the revelation of the other person's freedom.
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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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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