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Modern man likes to pretend that his thinking is wide-awake. But this wide-awake thinking has led us into the mazes of a nightmare in which the torture chambers are endlessly repeated in the mirrors of reason.

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
Modern
Nightmare
Reason
Pretend
Men
Torture
Thinking
Awake
Chambers
Terrorism
Mazes
Mirrors
Endlessly
Likes
Repeated
Wide
Chamber

More quotes by Octavio Paz

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Enormous and solid but swaying, beaten by the wind but chained, murmur of a million leaves against my window. Riot of trees, surge of dark green sounds. The grove, suddenly still, is a web of fronds and branches.
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Social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings.
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There is nothing sacred or untouchable except the freedom to think. Without criticism, that is to say, without rigor and experimentation, there is no science, without criticism there is no art or literature. I would also say that without criticism there is no healthy society.
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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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What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism.
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Watching I watch myself, what I see is my creation as though entering through my eyes perception is conception into an eye more crystal clear water of thoughts, what I watch watches me, I am the creation of what I see
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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.
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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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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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Solitude is the profoundest fact
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Deserve your dream.
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For every language that becomes extinct, an image of man disappears.
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Surrealism is not a school of poetry but a movement of liberation... A way of rediscovering the language of innocence, a renewal of the primordial pact, poetry is the basic text, the foundation of the human order. Surrealism is revolutionary because it is a return to the beginning of all beginnings.
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Poet: gardener of epitaphs.
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Self-discovery is above all the realization that we are alone.
Octavio Paz
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Light is time thinking about itself.
Octavio Paz