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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.

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
Language
Publicity
Speak
Meant
Keep
Silent
Two
Value
Also
Silence
Nothing
Knowing
Diminishing
Always
Values
Diminished
Times
Inseparable

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Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society.
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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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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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Self-discovery is above all the realization that we are alone.
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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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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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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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To fight evil is to fight ourselves.
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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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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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Every moment is nothing without end.
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The purpose of poetry is to restore to mankind the possibility to wonder.
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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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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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What characterizes a poem is its necessary dependence on words as much as its struggle to transcend them.
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The woman who died night after night and her dying was a long goodbye, a train that never left.
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A flower without a stem, is beauty waiting to die. A heart without love, is a tear waiting to cry.
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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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