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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.
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
Term
Society
Poetic
Two
Apart
Cannot
Realized
Without
Seek
Sometimes
Terms
Never
Poetry
Break
More quotes by Octavio Paz
To fight evil is to fight ourselves.
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Social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings.
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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.
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Art is what remains of religion: the dance above the yawning abyss.
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Every moment is nothing without end.
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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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The woman who died night after night and her dying was a long goodbye, a train that never left.
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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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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.
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The purpose of poetry is to restore to mankind the possibility to wonder.
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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.
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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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Death is the mother of forms.
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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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Contemporary man has rationalized the myths, but he has not been able to destroy them.
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What is art? A violet. Is that all? An artistic style is a living entity, a continuous process of invention. It can never be imposed from without born of the profoundest tendencies within a society, its direction is to a certain extent unpredictable, in much the same way as the eventual configuration of a tree's branches.
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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.
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The universe unfolds in the body, which is its mirror and its creature.
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Cubism had been an analysis of the object and an attempt to put it before us in its totality both as analysis and as synthesis, it was a criticism of appearance. Surrealism transmuted the object, and suddenly a canvas became an apparition: a new figuration, a real transfiguration.
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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.
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