#Quote
More Quotes by Octavio Paz
Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone.
What sets worlds in motion is the interplay of differences, their attractions and repulsions. Life is plurality, death is uniformity. By suppressing differences and pecularities, by eliminating different civilizations and cultures, progress weakens life and favors death. The ideal of a single civilization for everyone, implicit in the cult of progress and technique, impoverishes and mutilates us. Every view of the world that becomes extinct, every culture that disappears, diminishes a possibility of life
The American: a titan enamored of progress, a fanatical giant who worships "getting things done" but never asks himself what he is doing nor why he is doing it.
Each time we try to express ourselves we have to break with ourselves.
The supreme value is not the future but the present. The future is a deceitful time that always says to us, 'Not Yet,' and thus denies us... Whoever builds a house for future happiness builds a prison for the present.
Love is an attempt at penetrating another being, but it can only succeed if the surrender is mutual.
The beloved is already in our being, as thirst and "otherness." Being is eroticism. Inspiration is that strange voice that takes man out of himself to be every thing that he is, everything that he desires; another body, another being. Beyond, outside of me, in the green and gold thicket, among the tremulous branches, sings the unknown. It calls to me.
A flower without a stem, is beauty waiting to die. A heart without love, is a tear waiting to cry.
The universe unfolds in the body, which is its mirror and its creature.
To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears.
