Social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings.
—Octavio Paz
Topics: Critics, Criticism
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.
—Octavio Paz
Topics: Thought, Thoughts, Thinking
What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism.
—Octavio Paz
Topics: Art, Arts, Criticism, Artists
Man does not speak because he thinks; he thinks because he speaks. Or rather, speaking is no different than thinking: to speak is to think.
—Octavio Paz
Topics: Speech, Conversation
Art is an invention of aesthetics, which in turn is an invention of philosophers…. What we call art is a game.
—Octavio Paz
Topics: Beauty
Today we all speak, if not the same tongue, the same universal language. There is no one center, and time has lost its former coherence: East and West, yesterday and tomorrow exist as a confused jumble in each one of us. Different times and different spaces are combined in a here and now that is everywhere at once.
—Octavio Paz
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.
—Octavio Paz
Topics: Relationships
Every view of the world that becomes extinct, every culture that disappears, diminishes a possibility of life.
—Octavio Paz
Topics: Culture
Wisdom lies neither in fixity nor in change, but in the dialectic between the two.
—Octavio Paz
Topics: Change
Reality is a staircase going neither up nor down, we don’t move; today is today, always is today.
—Octavio Paz
Topics: Time Management
We are condemned to kill time, thus we die bit by bit.
—Octavio Paz
Topics: Time Management, Time, Waste
Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone.
—Octavio Paz
Topics: Loneliness, Solitude
Love is an attempt at penetrating another being, but it can only succeed if the surrender is mutual.
—Octavio Paz
Technology is not an image of the world but a way of operating on reality. The nihilism of technology lies not only in the fact that it is the most perfect expression of the will to power… but also in the fact that it lacks meaning.
—Octavio Paz
Topics: Technology
Literature is the expression of a feeling of deprivation, a recourse against a sense of something missing. But the contrary is also true: language is what makes us human. It is a recourse against the meaningless noise and silence of nature and history.
—Octavio Paz
Topics: Books, Literature
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Seamus Heaney Irish Poet, Playwright
- Henry Steele Commager American Historian
- Maurice Baring British Author
- Taitetsu Unno American Buddhist Scholar
- Czeslaw Milosz Polish-American Poet, Novelist
- Samuel Beckett Irish Novelist, Playwright
- Jacinto Benavente Spanish Dramatist
- Sigrid Undset Norwegian Novelist
- Maurice Maeterlinck Belgian Dramatist
- Enoch Powell British Politician
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