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" 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. "

Octavio Paz

Meaning

Better

Value

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" Deserve your dream. "

" The modern tradition is the tradition of revolt. The French Revolution is still our model today: history is violent change, and this change goes by the name of progress. I do not know whether these notions really apply to art. "

" Futurists wanted to suggest movement by means of a dynamic painting; Duchamp applies the notion of delay - or, rather, or analysis - to movement. "

" One of the most notable traits of the Mexican's character is his willingness to contemplate horror: he is even familiar and complacent in his dealings with it. "

" To the poet fated to be a poet, self-expression is as natural and as involuntary as breathing is to us ordinary mortals. "

Octavio Paz

Natural

Poet

" In the United States, man does not feel that he has been torn from the center of creation and suspended between hostile forces. He has built his own world, and it is built in his own image: it is his mirror. But now he cannot recognize himself in his inhuman objects, nor in his fellows. "

" Technology is neutral and sterile. Now, technology is the nature of modern man; it is our environment and our horizon. Of course, every work of man is a negation of nature, but at the same time, it is a bridge between nature and us. Technology changes nature in a more radical and decisive manner: it throws it out. "

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

" The minority of Mexicans who are aware of their own selves do not make up a closed or unchanging class. They are the only active group, in comparison with the Indian-Spanish inertia of the rest, and ever day they are shaping the country more and more into their own image. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears. "

" Our judgment and moral categories, our idea of the future, our opinions about the present or about justice, peace, or war, everything, without excluding our rejections of Marxism, is impregnated with Marxism. "

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

Octavio Paz

Big

Little

" For a man of my generation, our century has been a long intellectual and political struggle in favor of freedom. "

" 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. "

" All poems say the same thing, and each poem is unique. Each part reproduces the others, and each part is different. "

" 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. "

" No one is alone, and each change here brings about another change there. "

" The American War of Independence is the expulsion of the intrusive elements, alien to the American essence. If American reality is the reinvention of itself, whatever is found in any way irreducible or unassimilable is not American. "

" A society is defined as much by how it comes to terms with its past as by its attitude toward the future: its memories are no less revealing than its aims. "

" Man is alone everywhere. But the solitude of the Mexican, under the great stone night of the high plateau that is still inhabited by insatiable gods, is very different from that of the North American, who wanders in an abstract world of machines, fellow citizens and moral precepts. "

" We twentieth-century Mexicans, even those of pure Indian descent, look on the pre-Columbian world as a world on the other side, not only distant in time but across the cultural divide. "

" 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? "

" 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

" Sensation is amphibious: at the same time it joins us to and divides us from things. It is the door through which we enter into things but also through which we come out of them and realize that we are not things. "

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

" In the works of Duchamp, space begins to walk and take on form; it becomes a machine that spins arguments and philosophizes; it resists movement with delay and delay with irony. "