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Art is what remains of religion: the dance above the yawning abyss.

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
Yawning
Abyss
Remains
Dance
Religion
Art

More quotes by Octavio Paz

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What characterizes a poem is its necessary dependence on words as much as its struggle to transcend them.
Octavio Paz
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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
Octavio Paz
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Deserve your dream.
Octavio Paz
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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.
Octavio Paz
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Social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings.
Octavio Paz
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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?
Octavio Paz
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Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone.
Octavio Paz
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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
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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.
Octavio Paz
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The woman who died night after night and her dying was a long goodbye, a train that never left.
Octavio Paz
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Whatever is not stone is light
Octavio Paz
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Death is the mother of forms.
Octavio Paz
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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.
Octavio Paz
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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.
Octavio Paz
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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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Poet: gardener of epitaphs.
Octavio Paz
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Contemporary man has rationalized the myths, but he has not been able to destroy them.
Octavio Paz
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Poetry is not truth, it is the resurrection of presences.
Octavio Paz
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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.
Octavio Paz
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Self-discovery is above all the realization that we are alone.
Octavio Paz