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Octavio Paz Quotes

1914–1998 Mexico

Octavio Paz Lozano (31 March 1914 – 19 April 1998) was a poet, writer, diplomat, and winner of the 1990 Nobel Prize in Literature, the first Mexican writer to become a Nobel Laureate.

Mexico
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Random Octavio Paz quote

50 quotes

No one is alone, and each change here brings about another change there. No one is alone and nothing is solid: change is comprised of fixities that are momentary accords.

The Monkey Grammarian (1974)

Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone, and the only one who seeks out another.

The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950)

Following a path: reading a stretch of ground, deciphering a fragment of world.

The Monkey Grammarian (1974)

The world stretches out before me, the vast world of the big, the little, and the medium.

The Clerk's Vision (1949)

Their acts are a disturbance of order, not a criticism of it.

Alternating Current (1967)

Unweave the verbal fabric: reality will appear.

The Monkey Grammarian (1974)

All this means that fixity never is entirely fixity and that it is always a moment of change. Fixity is always momentary.

The Monkey Grammarian (1974)

Wisdom lies neither in fixity nor in change, but in the dialectic between the two. A constant coming and going: wisdom lies in the momentary.

The Monkey Grammarian (1974)

Since movement is a metaphor for change, the best thing will be to say: nonchange is (always) change. It would appear that I have finally arrived at the desired disequilibrium.

The Monkey Grammarian (1974)

Repetitions, you wander about lost amid repetitions, you are merely a repetition among other repetitions.

The Monkey Grammarian (1974)

Fixity is always momentary. But how can it always be so? If it were, it would not be momentary — or would not be fixity.

The Monkey Grammarian (1974)

It may be that, like things which speak to themselves in their language of things, language does not speak of things or of the world: it may speak only of itself and to itself.

The Monkey Grammarian (1974)

It is not proper to project our feelings onto things or to attribute our own sensations and passions to them. Can it also be improper to see in them a guide, a way of life?

The Monkey Grammarian (1974)

I begin all over again: if it does not make sense to say that fixity is always momentary, the same may not be true if I say that it never is.

The Monkey Grammarian (1974)

You are (I am) is a repetition among other repetitions. You are is I am; I am is you are: you are is I.

The Monkey Grammarian (1974)

All is visible and all elusive,
all is near and can't be touched.

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.

Signs in Rotation (1967)

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.

Alternating Current (1967)

I too await the coming of my hour, I too exist. No. I quit.

The Clerk's Vision (1949)

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.

Alternating Current (1967)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Octavio Paz (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.