More Quotes by Octavio Paz
Poetry is not truth, it is the resurrection of presences.
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.
Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone.
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.
By suppressing differences and peculiarities, by eliminating different civilizations and cultures, progress weakens life and favors death
The Mexican...is familiar with death. [He] jokes about it, caresses it, sleeps with it, celebrates it. It is one of his favorite toys and his most steadfast love.
Love is not a desire for beauty; it is a yearning for completion.
To love is to undress our names.
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.
A civilization that denies death ends by denying life.
