Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
Reality is a staircase going neither up nor down, we don't move today is today, always is today.
Octavio Paz
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
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
Moving
History
Reality
Today
Going
Staircase
Always
Staircases
Neither
Move
More quotes by Octavio Paz
Changes are inseparable from democracy. To defend democracy is to defend the possibility of change in turn, changes alone can strengthen democracy.
Octavio Paz
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.
Octavio Paz
Art is what remains of religion: the dance above the yawning abyss.
Octavio Paz
Deserve your dream.
Octavio Paz
The woman who died night after night and her dying was a long goodbye, a train that never left.
Octavio Paz
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
Octavio Paz
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.
Octavio Paz
The purpose of poetry is to restore to mankind the possibility to wonder.
Octavio Paz
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.
Octavio Paz
The universe unfolds in the body, which is its mirror and its creature.
Octavio Paz
Man, even man debased by the neocapitalism and pseudosocialism of our time, is a marvelous being because he sometimes speaks. Language is the mark, the sign, not of his fall but of his original innocence. Through the Word we may regain the lost kingdom and recover powers we possessed in the far-distant past.
Octavio Paz
I don't believe that there are dangerous writers: the danger of certain books is not in the books themselves but in the passions of their readers.
Octavio Paz
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.
Octavio Paz
Poetry is not truth, it is the resurrection of presences.
Octavio Paz
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.
Octavio Paz
Tradition is no longer a continuity but a series of sharp breaks. The modern tradition is the tradition of revolt.
Octavio Paz
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.
Octavio Paz
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
To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes to hear it is to see it with our ears.
Octavio Paz
Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society.
Octavio Paz
