50 quotes
To fight evil is to fight ourselves.
Itinerary (1994)
The relations between rhetoric and ethics are disturbing: the ease with which language can be twisted is worrisome, and the fact that our minds accept these perverse games so docilely is no less cause for concern.
The Monkey Grammarian (1974)
The Great Monkey closes his eyes, scratches himself again and muses: before the sun has become completely hidden — it is now fleeing amid the tall bamboo trees like an animal pursued by shadows — I shall succeed in reducing this grove of trees to a catalogue.
The Monkey Grammarian (1974)
My phrase is a moment, the moment of fixity in the monologue of Zeno the Eleatic and Huí Shih (“I leave today for Yüeh and I arrive yesterday”).
The Monkey Grammarian (1974)
And to fill all these white pages that are left for me with the same monotonous question: at what hour do the hours end?
The Clerk's Vision (1949)
Already many carry the purple insignia in their flesh. The light wind rises from the meadows of the past, and hurries closer to our time.
The Clerk's Vision (1949)
The idea of freedom is the mask of the tyrant.
No one hangs himself by the rope of a physical law. The equations fall tirelessly into themselves.
The Clerk's Vision (1949)
No use going out or staying at home. No use erecting walls against the impalpable.
The Clerk's Vision (1949)
There is no beginning, no original word: each one is a metaphor for another word which is a metaphor for yet another, and so on. All of them are translations of translations. A transparency in which the obverse is the reverse: fixity is always momentary.
The Monkey Grammarian (1974)
Only now have I understood that there was a secret relationship between what I have called my expulsion from the present and the writing of poetry.
Death is a mirror which reflects the vain gesticulations of the living. The whole motley confusion of acts, occasions, regrets and hopes which is the life of each one of us finds in death, not meaning or explanation, but an end.
The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950)
To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears.
Alternating Current (1967)
Between going and staying the day wavers
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.
The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950)
I remember my loves, my conversation, my friendships. I remember it all, see it all, see them all.
The Clerk's Vision (1949)
"Art" is an invention of aesthetics, which in turn is an invention of philosophers…what we call art is a game.
Alternating Current (1967)
No. I renounce my ration card, my I.D., my birth certificate, voter's registration, passport, code number, countersign, credentials, safe conduct pass, insignia, tattoo, brand.
The Clerk's Vision (1949)
The word "death" is not pronounced in New York, in Paris, in London, because it burns the lips. The Mexican, in contrast, is familiar with it, jokes about it, caresses it, sleeps with it, celebrates it; it is one of his favorite toys and his most steadfast love.
It is not the sword that shines in the confusion of what will be. It is not the saber, but fear and the whip. I speak of what is already among us.
The Clerk's Vision (1949)