What characterizes a poem is its necessary dependence on words as much as its struggle to transcend them. — Octavio Paz Copy Share Image
Poets have the gift to speak for others, Vasko Popa had the very rare quality of hearing the others. — Octavio Paz Copy Share Image
Poetry, in the past, was the center of our society, but with modernity it has retreated to the outskirts. I think the… — Octavio Paz Copy Share Image
Ruy-Sanchez's works of fiction are always amazing: adventure, poetry and intelligence in a new geometry of words... His writing has nerve and… — Octavio Paz Copy Share Image
We must cultivate and defend particularity, individuality, and irregularity-life. Human beings do not have a future in the collectivism of bureaucratic states… — Octavio Paz Copy Share Image
The purpose of poetry is to restore to mankind the possibility to wonder. — Octavio Paz Copy Share Image
To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears. — Octavio Paz Copy Share Image
There can be no society without poetry, but society can never be realized as poetry, it is never poetic. Sometimes the two… — Octavio Paz Copy Share Image
Eroticism is first and foremost a thirst for otherness. And the supernatural is the supreme otherness. This is perhaps the most noble… — Octavio Paz Copy Share Image
“[Eroticism is] the poetry of the body, the testimony of the senses. Like a poem, it is not linear, it meanders and… — Octavio Paz Copy Share Image
“This is perhaps the most noble aim of poetry, to attach ourselves to the world around us, to turn desire into love,… — Octavio Paz Copy Share Image
Two opposing forces inhabit the poem: one of elevation or up-rooting, which pulls the word from the language: the other of gravity,… — Octavio Paz Copy Share Image
Surrealism is not a school of poetry but a movement of liberation... A way of rediscovering the language of innocence, a renewal… — Octavio Paz Copy Share Image
“At times poetry is the vertigo of bodies and the vertigo of speech and the vertigo of death; the walk with eyes… — Octavio Paz Copy Share Image
What sets worlds in motion is the interplay of differences, their attractions and repulsions. Life is plurality, death is uniformity. By suppressing differences and… — Octavio Paz Copy Share Image
The religion of art, like the religion of politics, was born from the ruins of Christianity. Art inherited from the old religion the power… — Octavio Paz Copy Share Image
I thought that the world was a vast system of signs, a conversation between giant beings. My actions, the cricket's saw, the star's blink,… — Octavio Paz Copy Share Image
Changes are inseparable from democracy. To defend democracy is to defend the possibility of change; in turn, changes alone can strengthen democracy. — Octavio Paz Copy Share Image
It is not proper to project our feelings onto things or to attribute our own sensations and passions to them. Can it also be… — Octavio Paz Copy Share Image
“I went to the little window and inhaled the country air. One could hear the breathing of the night, feminine, enormous. ("The Blue Bouquet")” — Octavio Paz Copy Share Image
A glass pitcher, a wicker basket, a tunic of coarse cloth. Their beauty is inseparable from their function. Handicrafts belong to a world existing… — Octavio Paz Copy Share Image
“Between going and staying the day wavers, in love with its own transparency. The circular afternoon is now a bay where the world in… — Octavio Paz Copy Share Image
“Two bodies face to face Are at times two waves And the night is an ocean. Two bodies face to face Are sometimes two… — Octavio Paz Copy Share Image
