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

Octavio Paz Quotes

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

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

— Octavio Paz

A saint speaks with God or with himself, two forms of silence.

— Octavio Paz

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

Light is time reflecting on time.

— Octavio Paz

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

— Octavio Paz

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

— Octavio Paz

To reduce poetry to its reflections of historical events and movements would be like reducing the poet’s words to their logical or grammatical connotations.

— Octavio Paz

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

Desire turns us into ghosts.

— Octavio Paz

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

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

— Octavio Paz

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

— Octavio Paz

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

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

— Octavio Paz

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

Tell me how you die and I will tell you who you are.

— Octavio Paz

The associations of signs, whether it be strong or weak, is what distinguishes us humans from the other animals. Rather, it is what makes us complex, problematical, and unpredictable beings.

— Octavio Paz

La historia del amor es inseparable de la historia de la libertad de la mujer.

— Octavio Paz

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
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