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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
Cannot
Realized
Without
Seek
Sometimes
Terms
Never
Poetry
Break
Term
Society
Poetic
Two
Apart

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The universe unfolds in the body, which is its mirror and its creature.
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Contemporary man has rationalized the myths, but he has not been able to destroy them.
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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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Technology is not an image of the world but a way of operating on reality. The nihilism of technology lies not only in the fact that it is the most perfect expression of the will to power... but also in the fact that it lacks meaning.
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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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Tradition is no longer a continuity but a series of sharp breaks. The modern tradition is the tradition of revolt.
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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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Loving means getting rid of names.
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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.
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To love is to battle, to open doors, to cease to be a ghost with a number forever in chains, forever condemned by a faceless master the world changes if two look at each other and see.
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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.
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Art is an invention of aesthetics, which in turn is an invention of philosophers... What we call art is a game.
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For every language that becomes extinct, an image of man disappears.
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A civilization that denies death ends by denying life.
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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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What characterizes a poem is its necessary dependence on words as much as its struggle to transcend them.
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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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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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A flower without a stem, is beauty waiting to die. A heart without love, is a tear waiting to cry.
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The purpose of poetry is to restore to mankind the possibility to wonder.
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