"We must cultivate and defend particularity, individuality, and……" — Octavio Paz
"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.""
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Octavio Paz
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80 Quotes by Octavio Paz
Octavio Paz has 80 quotes on this site.
A few more worth reading:
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Believing ourselves to be possessors of absolute truth degrades us: we regard every person whose way of thinking is different…
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Solitude lies at the lowest depth of the human condition. Man is the only being who feels himself to be…
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Changes are inseparable from democracy. To defend democracy is to defend the possibility of change; in turn, changes alone can…
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Technology is not an image of the world but a way of operating on reality. The nihilism of technology lies…
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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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Today we all speak, if not the same tongue, the same universal language. There is no one center, and time…
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Modern man likes to pretend that his thinking is wide-awake. But this wide-awake thinking has led us into the mazes…
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Man, even man debased by the neocapitalism and pseudosocialism of our time, is a marvelous being because he sometimes speaks.…
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We are condemned to kill time, thus we die bit by bit.
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The North American system only wants to consider the positive aspects of reality. Men and women are subjected from childhood…
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Poet: gardener of epitaphs.
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What sets worlds in motion is the interplay of differences, their attractions and repulsions. Life is plurality, death is uniformity.…
See all 80 quotes by Octavio Paz »
More Abstract Quotes
This quote is filed under Abstract Quotes,
one of 741 quotes in that category. Here are a few more:
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To those who have exhausted politics, nothing remains but abstract thought.
— Honore de Balzac
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I was a really lousy artist as a kid. Too abstract expressionist; or I'd draw a big ram's head, really…
— Jean-Michel Basquiat
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In the abstract conception of universal wrong, all concrete responsibility vanishes.
— Theodor Adorno
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None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace.
— Theodor Adorno
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Good science fiction is intelligent. It asks big questions that are on people's minds. It's not impossible. It has some…
— Nicolas Cage
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Science fiction is a way that I can go into the abstract, go into the imagination, and audiences are still…
— Nicolas Cage
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I am searching for abstract ways of expressing reality, abstract forms that will enlighten my own mystery.
— Eric Cantona
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Abstract art: a product of the untalented sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.
— Al Capp
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Change means movement. Movement means friction. Only in the frictionless vacuum of a nonexistent abstract world can movement or change…
— Saul Alinsky
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'Woman on the Plaza,' with its distinct horizon, snow-like surfaces, wintry wall, stunning sunlight, sharp shadows, and hurrying figure, would…
— Sam Abell
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Old ideas give way slowly; for they are more than abstract logical forms and categories. They are habits, predispositions, deeply…
— John Dewey
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It is difficult to talk about fashion in the abstract, without a human body before my eyes, without drawings, without…
— Giorgio Armani
See all 741 Abstract Quotes »