#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.
We must cultivate and defend particularity, individuality, and irregularity-life. Human beings do not have a future in the collectivism of bureaucratic states or in the mass society created by capitalism. Every system, by virtue as much of its abstract nature as of its pretension to totality, is the enemy of life. As a forgotten Spanish poet, José Moreno Villa, put it with melancholy wit: "I have discovered in symmetry the root of much iniquity."
My body, plowed by your body, will turn into a field where one is sown and a hundred reaped.
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.
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.
Poetry is not truth, it is the resurrection of presences.
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.
Reality is a staircase going neither up nor down, we don't move; today is today, always is today.
A civilization that denies death ends by denying life.
A flower without a stem, is beauty waiting to die. A heart without love, is a tear waiting to cry.
