Octavio Paz Lozano (Spanish pronunciation: [okˈtaβjo pas loˈsano], audio (help·info); March 31, 1914 – April 19, 1998) was a Mexican poet and diplomat.
Every moment is nothing without end.
What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism.
Without democracy freedom is a chimera
Love is born at first sight; the friendship of a frequent and lengthy exchange.
Each time we try to express ourselves we have to break with ourselves.
A glass pitcher, a wicker basket, a tunic of coarse cloth. Their beauty is inseparable from their function. Handicrafts belong to a world existing before the separation of the useful and the beautiful.
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.
My body, plowed by your body, will turn into a field where one is sown and a hundred reaped.
Deserve your dream.
Contemporary man has rationalized the myths, but he has not been able to destroy them.
Grace is gratuitous; it is a gift.
What characterizes a poem is its necessary dependence on words as much as its struggle to transcend them.
Death is the mother of forms.
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.
Tradition is no longer a continuity but a series of sharp breaks. The modern tradition is the tradition of revolt.
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, were nothing but pauses and syllables, scattered phrases from that dialogue. What word could it be, of which I was only a syllable? Who speaks the word? To whom is it spoken?
a human being is never what he is but the self he seeks.
No one behind, no one ahead. The path the ancients cleared has closed. And the other path, everyone's path, easy and wide, goes nowhere. I am alone and find my way.
Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society.
Man, even man debased by the neocapitalism and pseudosocialism of our time, is a marvelous being because he sometimes speaks. Language is the mark, the sign, not of his fall but of his original innocence. Through the Word we may regain the lost kingdom and recover powers we possessed in the far-distant past.