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The purpose of poetry is to restore to mankind the possibility to wonder.

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
Mankind
Wonder
Purpose
Restore
Possibility
Poetry

More quotes by Octavio Paz

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For every language that becomes extinct, an image of man disappears.
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To fight evil is to fight ourselves.
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What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism.
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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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Poet: gardener of epitaphs.
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Deserve your dream.
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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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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.
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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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It is the Revolution, the magical word, the word that is going to change everything, that is going to bring us immense delight and a quick death.
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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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Every moment is nothing without end.
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Solitude is the profoundest fact
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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.
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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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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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Love is the revelation of the other person's freedom.
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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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Contemporary man has rationalized the myths, but he has not been able to destroy them.
Octavio Paz
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The universe unfolds in the body, which is its mirror and its creature.
Octavio Paz