- Being
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- Nov 07, 2020
Octavio Paz Quotes
Most Famous Octavio Paz Quotes of All Time!
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- Last Updated on May 30, 2021
- Game
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- Nov 07, 2020
Art is an invention of aesthetics, which in turn is an invention of philosophers... What we call art is a game.
- Dialectic
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- Nov 07, 2020
Wisdom lies neither in fixity nor in change, but in the dialectic between the two.
- History
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Dream
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- Nov 07, 2020
Deserve your dream.
- Know
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- Nov 07, 2020
Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society.
- Condemned
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- Nov 07, 2020
We are condemned to kill time, thus we die bit by bit.
- Hear
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- Nov 07, 2020
To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears.
- Love
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- Nov 07, 2020
Love is an attempt at penetrating another being, but it can only succeed if the surrender is mutual.
- Little
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- Nov 07, 2020
The world stretches before me, the vast world of the big, the little, and the medium.
- Moment
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- Nov 07, 2020
All of us, at some moment, have had a vision of our existence as something unique, untransferable and very precious. This revelation almost always takes place during adolescence.
- Consciousness
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- Nov 07, 2020
Self-discovery is above all the realization that we are alone: it is the opening of an impalpable, transparent wall - that of our consciousness - between the world and ourselves.
- Me
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- Nov 07, 2020
Despite the often illusory nature of essays on the psychology of a nation, it seems to me there is something revealing in the insistence with which a people will question itself during certain periods of its growth.
- Day
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- Nov 07, 2020
The minority of Mexicans who are aware of their own selves do not make up a closed or unchanging class. They are the only active group, in comparison with the Indian-Spanish inertia of the rest, and ever day they are shaping the country more and more into their own image.
- Mexican
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- Nov 07, 2020
The Mexican succumbs very easily to sentimental effusions, and therefore he shuns them.
- Fellow Citizens
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- Nov 07, 2020
Man is alone everywhere. But the solitude of the Mexican, under the great stone night of the high plateau that is still inhabited by insatiable gods, is very different from that of the North American, who wanders in an abstract world of machines, fellow citizens and moral precepts.
- Man
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- Nov 07, 2020
In the United States, man does not feel that he has been torn from the center of creation and suspended between hostile forces. He has built his own world, and it is built in his own image: it is his mirror. But now he cannot recognize himself in his inhuman objects, nor in his fellows.
- Hypocrisy
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- Nov 07, 2020
When hypocrisy is a character trait, it also affects one's thinking, because it consists in the negation of all the aspects of reality that one finds disagreeable, irrational or repugnant.
- He
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- Nov 07, 2020
One of the most notable traits of the Mexican's character is his willingness to contemplate horror: he is even familiar and complacent in his dealings with it.
- History
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- Nov 07, 2020
Man, it seems to me, is not in history: he is history.
- More
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- Nov 07, 2020
The object of poetic activity is essentially language: whatever his beliefs and convictions, the poet is more concerned with words than with what these words designate.
- Everyone
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- Nov 07, 2020
Abstract painting seeks to be a pure pictorial language, and thus attempts to escape the essential impurity of all languages: the recourse to signs or forms that have meanings shared by everyone.
- Fated
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- Nov 07, 2020
To the poet fated to be a poet, self-expression is as natural and as involuntary as breathing is to us ordinary mortals.
- Love
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- Nov 07, 2020
In antiquity, a woman might be an object of worship or desire, but never of love.
- Old
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- Nov 07, 2020
To us, the value of a work lies in its newness: the invention of new forms, or a novel combination of old forms, the discovery of unknown worlds or the exploration of unfamiliar areas in worlds already discovered - revelations, surprises.
- Change
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- Nov 07, 2020
The modern tradition is the tradition of revolt. The French Revolution is still our model today: history is violent change, and this change goes by the name of progress. I do not know whether these notions really apply to art.
- Better
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- Nov 07, 2020
Changes in our aesthetic tastes have no value or meaning in and of themselves; what has value and meaning is the idea of change itself. Or, better stated: not change in and of itself, but change as an agent or inspiration of modern creations.
- New
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- Nov 07, 2020
The characteristic feature of modernity is criticism: what is new is set over and against what is old, and it is this constant contrast that constitutes the continuity of tradition.
- Beginning
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- Nov 07, 2020
The idea of modernity is beginning to lose its vitality. It is losing it because modernity is no longer a critical attitude but an accepted, codified convention.
- New
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- Nov 07, 2020
If contemporary artists sincerely seek to be original, unique, and new, they should begin by disregarding the notions of originality, individuality, and innovation: they are the cliches of our time.
- Neighbor
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- Nov 07, 2020
Picasso is what is going to happen and what is happening; he is posterity and archaic time, the distant ancestor and our next-door neighbor. Speed permits him to be two places at once, to belong to all the centuries without letting go of the here and now.
- Irony
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- Nov 07, 2020
In the works of Duchamp, space begins to walk and take on form; it becomes a machine that spins arguments and philosophizes; it resists movement with delay and delay with irony.
- Law
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- Nov 07, 2020
Art for Duchamp, all the arts, obey the same law: meta-irony is inherent in their very spirit. It is an irony that destroys its own negation and, hence, returns in the affirmative.
- Movement
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- Nov 07, 2020
Futurists wanted to suggest movement by means of a dynamic painting; Duchamp applies the notion of delay - or, rather, or analysis - to movement.
- Being
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- Nov 07, 2020
For the Chinese, the Greeks, the Mayans, or the Egyptians, nature was a living totality, a creative being. For this reason, art, according to Aristotle, is imitation; the poet imitates the creative gesture of nature.
- Nature
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- Nov 07, 2020
Technology is neutral and sterile. Now, technology is the nature of modern man; it is our environment and our horizon. Of course, every work of man is a negation of nature, but at the same time, it is a bridge between nature and us. Technology changes nature in a more radical and decisive manner: it throws it out.
- End
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- Nov 07, 2020
We go along, without a fixed itinerary, yet at the same time with an end (what end?) in mind, and with the aim of reaching the end. A search for the end, a dread of the end: the obverse and the reverse of the same act.
- Nature
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- Nov 07, 2020
Yes, I am well aware that nature - or what we call nature: that totality of objects and processes that surrounds us and that alternately creates us and devours us - is neither our accomplice nor our confidant.
- Life
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- Nov 07, 2020
It is not proper to project our feelings onto things or to attribute our own sensations and passions to them. Can it also be improper to see in them a guide, a way of life?
- Coming
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- Nov 07, 2020
Wisdom lies neither in fixity nor in change, but in the dialectic between the two. A constant coming and going: wisdom lies in the momentary.
- How
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- Nov 07, 2020
Fixity is always momentary. But how can it always be so? If it were, it would not be momentary - or would not be fixity.
- Concern
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- Nov 07, 2020
The relations between rhetoric and ethics are disturbing: the ease with which language can be twisted is worrisome, and the fact that our minds accept these perverse games so docilely is no less cause for concern.
- New
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- Nov 07, 2020
Poems - crystallizations of the universal play of analogy, transparent objects which, as they reproduce the mechanism and the rotary motion of analogy, are waterspouts of new analogies.
- Others
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- Nov 07, 2020
All poems say the same thing, and each poem is unique. Each part reproduces the others, and each part is different.
- Decision
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- Nov 07, 2020
In each verse, a decision awaits us, and we can't choose to close our eyes and let instinct work on its own. Poetic instinct consists of an alert tension.
- Liberty
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- Nov 07, 2020
Poetry is the experience of liberty. The poet risks himself, chances all on the poem's all with each verse he writes.
- Great
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- Nov 07, 2020
Walt Whitman is the only great modern poet who does not seem to experience discord when he faces his world. Not even solitude - his monologue is a universal chorus.
- Future
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- Nov 07, 2020
The presence and the present of America are a future; our continent is, by its nature, the land which does not exist on its own, but as something which is created and invented.
- Language
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- Nov 07, 2020
In order for sensation to accede to the objectivity of things, it must itself be changed into a thing. The agent of change is language: the sensations are turned into verbal objects.
- Man
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- Nov 07, 2020
Words are things, but things which mean. We cannot do away with meaning without doing away with signs, that is, with language itself. Moreover, we would have to do away with the universe. All the things man touches are impregnated with meaning.
- Me
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- Nov 07, 2020
It has always surprised me that in a world of relations as hard as that of the United States, cordiality constantly springs out like water from an unstanchable fountain.
- Language
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- Nov 07, 2020
To be a great painter means to be a great poet: someone who transcends the limits of his language.
- Poetry
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- Nov 07, 2020
Surrealism is not a poetry but a poetics, and even more, and more decisively, a world vision.
- Ecclesiastical
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- Nov 07, 2020
An unread author is an author who is a victim of the worst kind of censorship, indifference - a censorship more effective than the Ecclesiastical Index.
- Nature
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- Nov 07, 2020
Poetry is not a genre in harmony with the modern world; its innermost nature is hostile or indifferent to the dogmas of modern times, progress and the cult of the future.
- Morality
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- Nov 07, 2020
Poetry, whatever the manifest content of the poem, is always a violation of the rationalism and morality of bourgeois society.
- Future
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- Nov 07, 2020
A society is defined as much by how it comes to terms with its past as by its attitude toward the future: its memories are no less revealing than its aims.
- History
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- Nov 07, 2020
The truth is that the history of Mexico is a history in the image of its geography: abrupt and tortuous. Each historical period is like a plateau surrounded by tall mountains and separated from the other plateaus by precipices and divides.
- Pure
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- Nov 07, 2020
We twentieth-century Mexicans, even those of pure Indian descent, look on the pre-Columbian world as a world on the other side, not only distant in time but across the cultural divide.
- Defines
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- Nov 07, 2020
As it defines itself, every society defines other societies. That definition almost always takes the form of a condemnation: the 'other' is the barbarian.
- Die
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- Nov 07, 2020
Literatures, like trees and plants, are born of a land and in it flourish and die. But literatures, also like plants, may be carried abroad to take root in a foreign soil.
- Inspiration
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- Nov 07, 2020
Wit invents; inspiration reveals. The inventions of wit are conceits - metaphors and paradoxes - that discover the secret correspondences that unite beings and things among and with themselves; inspiration is condemned to dissipate its revelations - unless a form can be found to contain them.
- Poetry
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- Nov 07, 2020
Any reflection about poetry should begin, or end, with this question: who and how many read poetry books?
- Future
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- Nov 07, 2020
Our judgment and moral categories, our idea of the future, our opinions about the present or about justice, peace, or war, everything, without excluding our rejections of Marxism, is impregnated with Marxism.
- Great
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- Nov 07, 2020
Little by little, not without astonishment, I rediscovered the great names of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, who had been the master thinkers of my grandfather and other Mexican liberals. They did no offer me a doctrine or a catechism: they were and they are a source, an inspiration.
- Long
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- Nov 07, 2020
For a man of my generation, our century has been a long intellectual and political struggle in favor of freedom.
- Distinctive
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- Nov 07, 2020