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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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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
Necessary
Poetry
Struggle
Words
Art
Characterizes
Much
Transcend
Dependence
Poem

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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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Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society.
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To fight evil is to fight ourselves.
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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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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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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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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.
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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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Social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings.
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Poet: gardener of epitaphs.
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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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Every moment is nothing without end.
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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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Whatever is not stone is light
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When a society decays, it is language that is first to become gangrenous. As a result, social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings
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Light is time thinking about itself.
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The purpose of poetry is to restore to mankind the possibility to wonder.
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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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For every language that becomes extinct, an image of man disappears.
Octavio Paz