Quote

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.

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
Eye
Forms
Disappears
Form
Shapes
Visions
Also
Meet
Sensations
Think
Thoughts
Sets
Thinking
Memories
Images
Vision
Appear
Path
Forth
Fragmentary
Half
Disappear
Wink

More quotes by 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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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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Poetry is not truth, it is the resurrection of presences.
Octavio Paz
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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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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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The universe unfolds in the body, which is its mirror and its creature.
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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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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For every language that becomes extinct, an image of man disappears.
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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Solitude is the profoundest fact
Octavio Paz
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Poet: gardener of epitaphs.
Octavio Paz
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What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism.
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 world is born when two people kiss
Octavio Paz
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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.
Octavio Paz
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Loving means getting rid of names.
Octavio Paz
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A civilization that denies death ends by denying life.
Octavio Paz
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Social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings.
Octavio Paz
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Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society.
Octavio Paz