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Man does not speak because he thinks he thinks because he speaks. Or rather, speaking is no different than thinking: to speak is to think.

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
Rather
Speak
Doe
Different
Men
Speaks
Think
Speaking
Thinking
Thinks
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More quotes by 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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Every moment is nothing without end.
Octavio Paz
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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
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Poetry is not truth, it is the resurrection of presences.
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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Ruy-Sanchez's works of fiction are always amazing: adventure, poetry and intelligence in a new geometry of words... His writing has nerve and agility, his intelligence is sharp without being cruel, his mood is sympathetic without complicity.
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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Art is what remains of religion: the dance above the yawning abyss.
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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Deserve your dream.
Octavio Paz
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Solitude is the profoundest fact
Octavio Paz
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Love is the revelation of the other person's freedom.
Octavio Paz
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Eroticism is first and foremost a thirst for otherness. And the supernatural is the supreme otherness. This is perhaps the most noble aim of poetry, to attach ourselves to the world around us, to turn desire into love, to embrace, finally what always evades us, what is beyond, but what is always there – the unspoken, the spirit, the soul.
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 purpose of poetry is to restore to mankind the possibility to wonder.
Octavio Paz
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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
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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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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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The universe unfolds in the body, which is its mirror and its creature.
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