Octavio Paz Quotes

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.

Every view of the world that becomes extinct, every culture that disappears, diminishes a possibility of life

The universe unfolds in the body, which is its mirror and its creature.

Loving means getting rid of names.

If we are a metaphor of the universe, the human couple is the metaphor par excellence, the point of intersection of all forces and the seed of all forms. The couple is time recaptured, the return to the time before time.

Beyond myself, somewhere, I wait for my arrival.

Social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings.

Art is what remains of religion: the dance above the yawning abyss.

By diminishing the value of silence, publicity has also diminished that of language. The two are inseparable: knowing how to speak has always meant knowing how to keep silent, knowing that there are times when one should say nothing.

We are condemned to kill time, thus we die bit by bit.

To love is to battle, to open doors, to cease to be a ghost with a number forever in chains, forever condemned by a faceless master; the world changes if two look at each other and see.

Watching I watch myself, what I see is my creation as though entering through my eyes perception is conception into an eye more crystal clear water of thoughts, what I watch watches me, I am the creation of what I see