Quotes from Octavio Paz

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.

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.

No one is alone, and each change here brings about another change there.

Futurists wanted to suggest movement by means of a dynamic painting; Duchamp applies the notion of delay - or, rather, or analysis - to movement.

Art is an invention of aesthetics, which in turn is an invention of philosophers... What we call art is a game.

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.

Solitude lies at the lowest depth of the human condition. Man is the only being who feels himself to be alone and the only one who is searching for the Other.

Death is the mother of forms.

Whatever is not stone is light

To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears.

The purpose of poetry is to restore to mankind the possibility to wonder.

What characterizes a poem is its necessary dependence on words as much as its struggle to transcend them.

Drugs are nihilistic: they undermine all values and radically overturn all our ideas about good and evil, what is just and what is unjust, what is permitted and what is forbidden.

Reality is a staircase going neither up nor down, we don't move; today is today, always is today.

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.

All poems say the same thing, and each poem is unique. Each part reproduces the others, and each part is different.

To the poet fated to be a poet, self-expression is as natural and as involuntary as breathing is to us ordinary mortals.

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.

A work survives its readers; after a hundred or two hundred years, it is read by new readers who impose on it new modes of reading and interpretation. The work survives because of these interpretations, which are, in fact, resurrections: without them, there would be no work.

As it defines itself, every society defines other societies. That definition almost always takes the form of a condemnation: the 'other' is the barbarian.

Art is what remains of religion: the dance above the yawning abyss.

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.

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.

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.