Top 100 Octavio Paz Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “The universe unfolds in the body, which is its mirror and its creature.”

— Octavio Paz

52. “Grace is gratuitous; it is a gift.”

— Octavio Paz

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

— Octavio Paz

54. “Tradition is no longer a continuity but a series of sharp breaks. The modern tradition is the tradition of revolt.”

— Octavio Paz

55. “It is the Revolution, the magical word, the word that is going to change everything, that is going to bring us immense delight and a quick death.”

— Octavio Paz

56. “Self-discovery is above all the realization that we are alone.”

— Octavio Paz

57. “Art is the opposite of dissipation, in the physical and spiritual sense of the word: it is concentration, desire that seeks incarnation.”

— Octavio Paz

58. “Each time we try to express ourselves we have to break with ourselves.”

— Octavio Paz

59. “Freedom is not a philosophy, nor it is even an idea. It is a movement of consciousness that lead us, at certain moments, to utter one of two monosyllables: Yes or No. In their brevity, lasting but an instant, like a flash of lighting, the contradictory character of human nature stands revealed.”

— Octavio Paz

60. “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.”

— Octavio Paz

61. “Man does not speak because he thinks; he thinks because he speaks. Or rather, speaking is no different than thinking: to speak is to think.”

— Octavio Paz

62. “Death and birth are solitary experiences. We are born alone and we die alone. When we are expelled from the maternal womb, we begin the painful struggle that finally ends in death.”

— Octavio Paz

63. “Reality is a staircase going neither up nor down, we don’t move; today is today, always is today.”

— Octavio Paz

64. “Changes are inseparable from democracy. To defend democracy is to defend the possibility of change; in turn, changes alone can strengthen democracy.”

— Octavio Paz

65. “By suppressing differences and peculiarities, by eliminating different civilizations and cultures, progress weakens life and favors death.”

— Octavio Paz

66. “Social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings.”

— Octavio Paz

67. “Whatever is not stone is light.”

— Octavio Paz

68. “Poetry, in the past, was the center of our society, but with modernity it has retreated to the outskirts. I think the exile of poetry is also the exile of the best of humankind.”

— Octavio Paz

69. “Believing ourselves to be possessors of absolute truth degrades us: we regard every person whose way of thinking is different from ours as a monster and a threat and by so doing turn our own selves into monsters and threats to our fellows.”

— Octavio Paz

70. “Una persona “sufrida” es menos sensible al dolor que las que apenas si ha sido tocadas por la adversidad.”

— Octavio Paz

71. “Poet: gardener of epitaphs.”

— Octavio Paz

72. “My body, plowed by your body, will turn into a field where one is sown and a hundred reaped.”

— Octavio Paz

73. “Therefore the fiesta is not only an excess, a ritual squandering of the goods painfully accumulated during the rest of the year; it is also a revolt, a sudden immersion in the formless, in pure being. By means of the fiesta society frees itself from the norms it has established. It ridicules its gods, its principles, and its laws: it denies its own self.”

— Octavio Paz

74. “Enormous and solid but swaying, beaten by the wind but chained, murmur of a million leaves against my window. Riot of trees, surge of dark green sounds. The grove, suddenly still, is a web of fronds and branches.”

— Octavio Paz

75. “Reversibility: seeing through opaqueness, not-seeing through transparency. The wooden door and the glass door: two opposite facets of the same idea. This opposition is resolved in an identity: in both cases we look at ourselves looking. Hinge procedure. The question “What do we see?” confronts us with ourselves.”

— Octavio Paz

76. “Language lies outside of society because it is its foundation; but it also lies within society because that is the only place where it exists and the only place where it develops.”

— Octavio Paz

77. “Poets have the gift to speak for others, Vasko Popa had the very rare quality of hearing the others.”

— Octavio Paz

78. “The whole motley confusion of acts, omissions, regrets and hopes which is the life of each one of us finds in death, not meaning or explanation, but an end.”

— Octavio Paz

79. “I do not condemn the cult of pleasure; I lament the general vulgarity.”

— Octavio Paz

80. “Progress has peopled history with the marvels and monsters of technology but it has depopulated the life of man. It has given us more things but not more being.”

— Octavio Paz

81. “Light is time reflecting on time.”

— Octavio Paz

82. “It is always difficult to give oneself up; few persons anywhere ever succeed in doing so, and even fewer transcend the possessive stage to know love for what it actually is: a perpetual discovery, and immersion in the waters of reality, an unending re-creation.”

— Octavio Paz

83. “Revolt is the violence of an entire people; rebellion the unruliness of an individual or an uprising by a minority; both are spontaneous and blind. Revolution is both planned and spontaneous, a science and an art.”

— Octavio Paz

84. “History has the cruel reality of a nightmare, and the grandeur of man consists in his making beautiful and lasting works out of the real substance of that nightmare. Or, to put it another way, it consists in transforming the nightmare into vision; in freeing ourselves from the shapeless horror of reality – if only for an instant – by means of creation.”

— Octavio Paz

85. “Mineral cactai, quicksilver lizards in the adobe walls, the bird that punctures space, thirst, tedium, clouds of dust, impalpable epiphanies of wind. The pines taught me to talk to myself. In that garden I learnedto send myself off. Later there were no gardens.”

— Octavio Paz

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

— Octavio Paz

87. “He is astonished at the fact of his being, and this astonishment leads to reflection: as he leans over the river of his consciousness, he asks himself if the face that appears there, disfigured by the water, is his own. The singularity of his being, which is pure sensation in children, becomes a problem and a question.”

— Octavio Paz

88. “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. When we emerge, perhaps we will realize that we have been dreaming with our eyes open, and that the dreams of reason are intolerable. And then, perhaps, we will begin to dream once more with our eyes closed.”

— Octavio Paz

89. “Power immobilizes; it freezes with a single gesture-grandiose, terrible, theatrical, or finally, simply monotonous-the variety which is life.”

— Octavio Paz

90. “And it is significant that a country as sorrowful as ours should have so many and such joyous fiestas. Their frequency, their brilliance and excitement, the enthusiasm with which we take part, all suggest that without them we would explode.”

— Octavio Paz

91. “Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society.”

— Octavio Paz

92. “The past reappears because it is a hidden present.”

— Octavio Paz

93. “Desire turns us into ghosts.”

— Octavio Paz

94. “The American: a titan enamored of progress, a fanatical giant who worships “getting things done” but never asks himself what he is doing nor why he is doing it.”

— Octavio Paz

95. “We are witnessing now, at the end of the century, the resurrection of ethnic and psychic passions, beliefs, ideas, and realities that seemed to have been long buried. The return of religious passion and nationalist fervor hides an ambiguous meaning: Is it the return of ghosts and demons that reason had exorcised, or is it the revelation of profound truths and realities that had been ignored by our proud intellectual constructs?”

— Octavio Paz

96. “I do not know if the story repeats itself: I only know that people change little.”

— Octavio Paz

97. “Loving means getting rid of names.”

— Octavio Paz

98. “If society abolishes poetry it commits spiritual suicide.”

— Octavio Paz

99. “How to speak, oh Dream, your silence out loud?”

— Octavio Paz

100. “La historia del amor es inseparable de la historia de la libertad de la mujer.”

— Octavio Paz