More Quotes by Octavio Paz
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.
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.
My body, plowed by your body, will turn into a field where one is sown and a hundred reaped.
Eroticism is first and foremost a thirst for otherness. And the supernatural is the supreme otherness. This is perhaps the most noble aim of poetry, to attach ourselves to the world around us, to turn desire into love, to embrace, finally what always evades us, what is beyond, but what is always there – the unspoken, the spirit, the soul.
Beyond happiness or unhappiness, though it is both things, love is intensity; it does not give us eternity but life, that second in which the doors of time and space open just a crack: here is there and now is always.
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.
For every language that becomes extinct, an image of man disappears.
The universe unfolds in the body, which is its mirror and its creature.
To love is to undress our names.
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.
