Top 100 Octavio Paz Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Deserve your dream.”

— Octavio Paz

Featured in: Dream Big Quotes, Desire Quotes

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

— Octavio Paz

3. “Beyond myself, somewhere, I wait for my arrival.”

— Octavio Paz

4. “The value of e-commerce is not in the e, but in the commerce.”

— Octavio Paz

5. “To love is to battle, to open doors. The world changes if two can look at each other and see.”

— Octavio Paz

6. “Love is the revelation of the other person’s freedom.”

— Octavio Paz

7. “When we learn to speak, we learn to translate.”

— Octavio Paz

8. “Every moment is nothing without end.”

— Octavio Paz

9. “The world is born when two people kiss.”

— Octavio Paz

10. “Watching I watch myself, what I see is my creation as though entering through my eyes perception is conception into an eye more crystal clear water of thoughts, what I watch watches me, I am the creation of what I see.”

— Octavio Paz

11. “Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone.”

— Octavio Paz

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

— Octavio Paz

13. “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.”

— Octavio Paz

14. “What sets worlds in motion is the interplay of differences, their attractions and repulsions; life is plurality, death is uniformity.”

— Octavio Paz

15. “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.”

— Octavio Paz

16. “Love is an attempt to penetrate another being, but it can only be realized if the surrender is mutual.”

— Octavio Paz

17. “We are condemned to kill time, thus we die bit by bit.”

— Octavio Paz

18. “A flower without a stem, is beauty waiting to die. A heart without love, is a tear waiting to cry.”

— Octavio Paz

19. “Love is not a desire for beauty; it is a yearning for completion.”

— Octavio Paz

20. “Light is time thinking about itself.”

— Octavio Paz

21. “Erotic acts are instinctive; they fulfill a role in nature. The idea is familiar, but it is one that contains a paradox: there is nothing more natural than sexual desire; there is nothing less natural than the forms in which it is made manifest and satisfied.”

— Octavio Paz

22. “For every language that becomes extinct, an image of man disappears.”

— Octavio Paz

23. “La mucha luz es como la mucha sombra: no deja ver.”

— Octavio Paz

24. “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.”

— Octavio Paz

25. “To love is to undress our names.”

— Octavio Paz

26. “Poetry is not truth, it is the resurrection of presences.”

— Octavio Paz

27. “What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism.”

— Octavio Paz

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

— Octavio Paz

29. “Beyond happiness or unhappiness, though it is both things, love is intensity; it does not give us eternity but life, that second in which the doors of time and space open just a crack: here is there and now is always.”

— Octavio Paz

30. “Without democracy freedom is a chimera.”

— Octavio Paz

31. “Love is born at first sight; the friendship of a frequent and lengthy exchange.”

— Octavio Paz

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

32. “There is nothing sacred or untouchable except the freedom to think. Without criticism, that is to say, without rigor and experimentation, there is no science, without criticism there is no art or literature. I would also say that without criticism there is no healthy society.”

— Octavio Paz

33. “Wisdom lies neither in fixity nor in change, but in the dialectic between the two.”

— Octavio Paz

34. “To fight evil is to fight ourselves.”

— Octavio Paz

35. “Modern man likes to pretend that his thinking is wide-awake. But this wide-awake thinking has led us into the mazes of a nightmare in which the torture chambers are endlessly repeated in the mirrors of reason.”

— Octavio Paz

36. “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.”

— Octavio Paz

37. “Human nature is universial, and it endures through all cultures and epochs. This is the secret of perenniality of certain poems and books.”

— Octavio Paz

38. “By diminishing the value of silence, publicity has also diminished that of language. The two are inseparable: knowing how to speak has always meant knowing how to keep silent, knowing that there are times when one should say nothing.”

— Octavio Paz

39. “I don’t believe that there are dangerous writers: the danger of certain books is not in the books themselves but in the passions of their readers.”

— Octavio Paz

Featured in: Book Quotes

40. “Solitude is the profoundest fact.”

— Octavio Paz

41. “There can be no society without poetry, but society can never be realized as poetry, it is never poetic. Sometimes the two terms seek to break apart. They cannot.”

— Octavio Paz

42. “A civilization that denies death ends by denying life.”

— Octavio Paz

43. “Contemporary man has rationalized the myths, but he has not been able to destroy them.”

— Octavio Paz

44. “Every view of the world that becomes extinct, every culture that disappears, diminishes a possibility of life.”

— Octavio Paz

45. “If each of my words were a drop of water, you would see through them and glimpse what I feel: gratitude, acknowledgement.”

— Octavio Paz

46. “The ideal of a single civilization for everyone, implicit in the cult of progress and technique, impoverishes and mutilates us.”

— Octavio Paz

47. “El mexicano puede doblarse, humillarse, “agacharse”, pero no “rajarse.”

— Octavio Paz

48. “Death is the mother of forms.”

— Octavio Paz

49. “If we are a metaphor of the universe, the human couple is the metaphor par excellence, the point of intersection of all forces and the seed of all forms. The couple is time recaptured, the return to the time before time.”

— Octavio Paz

50. “Si las revoluciones no se hacen con palabras, las ideas no se implantan con decretos.”

— Octavio Paz