Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" Abstract painting seeks to be a pure pictorial language, and thus attempts to escape the essential impurity of all languages: the recourse to signs or forms that have meanings shared by everyone. "

Related Quotes:

" 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

Nature

Language

True

" What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism. "

" The presence and the present of America are a future; our continent is, by its nature, the land which does not exist on its own, but as something which is created and invented. "

" Little by little, not without astonishment, I rediscovered the great names of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, who had been the master thinkers of my grandfather and other Mexican liberals. They did no offer me a doctrine or a catechism: they were and they are a source, an inspiration. "

Octavio Paz

Great

Mexican

" I think we all have our own personality, unique and distinctive, and at the same time, I think that our own unique and distinctive personality blends with the wind, with the footsteps in the street, with the noises around the corner, and with the silence of memory, which is the great producer of ghosts. "

" Poetry is the experience of liberty. The poet risks himself, chances all on the poem's all with each verse he writes. "

" The sound of water is worth more than all the poets' words. "

" 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. "

" Love is an attempt at penetrating another being, but it can only succeed if the surrender is mutual. "

" We go along, without a fixed itinerary, yet at the same time with an end (what end?) in mind, and with the aim of reaching the end. A search for the end, a dread of the end: the obverse and the reverse of the same act. "

Octavio Paz

Aim

Time

" Yes, I am well aware that nature - or what we call nature: that totality of objects and processes that surrounds us and that alternately creates us and devours us - is neither our accomplice nor our confidant. "

Octavio Paz

Processes

Well

" Poetry is not a genre in harmony with the modern world; its innermost nature is hostile or indifferent to the dogmas of modern times, progress and the cult of the future. "

" Any reflection about poetry should begin, or end, with this question: who and how many read poetry books? "

" The Mexican succumbs very easily to sentimental effusions, and therefore he shuns them. "

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

" Deserve your dream. "

" The object of poetic activity is essentially language: whatever his beliefs and convictions, the poet is more concerned with words than with what these words designate. "

" In order for sensation to accede to the objectivity of things, it must itself be changed into a thing. The agent of change is language: the sensations are turned into verbal objects. "

" In antiquity, a woman might be an object of worship or desire, but never of love. "

" For the Chinese, the Greeks, the Mayans, or the Egyptians, nature was a living totality, a creative being. For this reason, art, according to Aristotle, is imitation; the poet imitates the creative gesture of nature. "

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

Octavio Paz

Big

Little

" Changes in our aesthetic tastes have no value or meaning in and of themselves; what has value and meaning is the idea of change itself. Or, better stated: not change in and of itself, but change as an agent or inspiration of modern creations. "

" Despite the often illusory nature of essays on the psychology of a nation, it seems to me there is something revealing in the insistence with which a people will question itself during certain periods of its growth. "

" Surrealism is not a poetry but a poetics, and even more, and more decisively, a world vision. "

" If contemporary artists sincerely seek to be original, unique, and new, they should begin by disregarding the notions of originality, individuality, and innovation: they are the cliches of our time. "

" Man, it seems to me, is not in history: he is history. "

Octavio Paz

Seems

History

" As it defines itself, every society defines other societies. That definition almost always takes the form of a condemnation: the 'other' is the barbarian. "

" An unread author is an author who is a victim of the worst kind of censorship, indifference - a censorship more effective than the Ecclesiastical Index. "

Octavio Paz

Censorship

Kind

" 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. "

" Even though the society that Marx foresaw is far from being an historical reality, Marxism has penetrated so deeply in history that we are all Marxists, one way or another, even unknowingly. "