"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."
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Quote collection
Octavio Paz quotes (page 1 of 6)
108 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"What sets worlds in motion is the interplay of differences, their attractions and repulsions. Life is plurality, death is uniformity. By suppressing differences and pecularities, by eliminating different civilizations and cultures, progress weakens life and favors death. The ideal of a single civilization for everyone, implicit in the cult of progress and technique, impoverishes and mutilates us. Every view of the world that becomes extinct, every culture that disappears, diminishes a possibility of life"
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"Beyond myself, somewhere, I wait for my arrival."
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"Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone."
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"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."
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"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."
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"Deserve your dream."
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"A flower without a stem, is beauty waiting to die. A heart without love, is a tear waiting to cry."
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"Love is not a desire for beauty; it is a yearning for completion."
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"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."
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"A civilization that denies death ends by denying life."
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"Whatever is not stone is light"
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"Every moment is nothing without end."
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"To love is to undress our names."
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"To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears."
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"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."
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"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."
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"Humankind is never what he is but the self he seeks."
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"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."
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"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."
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