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" 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. "
Octavio Paz
Think
Speak
Man
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" 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. "
Octavio Paz
American
Independence
War
" Man, it seems to me, is not in history: he is history. "
Octavio Paz
Seems
He
History
" 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. "
Octavio Paz
Own
Present
Nature
" Art is an invention of aesthetics, which in turn is an invention of philosophers... What we call art is a game. "
Octavio Paz
Art
Call
Game
" 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. "
Octavio Paz
Peace
Justice
Future
" Love is an attempt at penetrating another being, but it can only succeed if the surrender is mutual. "
Octavio Paz
Love Is
Surrender
Love
" Words are things, but things which mean. We cannot do away with meaning without doing away with signs, that is, with language itself. Moreover, we would have to do away with the universe. All the things man touches are impregnated with meaning. "
Octavio Paz
Language
Meaning
Words
" 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. "
Octavio Paz
Rest
Own
Group
" It has always surprised me that in a world of relations as hard as that of the United States, cordiality constantly springs out like water from an unstanchable fountain. "
Octavio Paz
Always
Fountain
Hard
" The work of art is always unfaithful to its creator... Art lays at a higher level; it says something more, and almost always, it says something different from what the artist wanted to say. "
Octavio Paz
Artist
More
Always
" In antiquity, a woman might be an object of worship or desire, but never of love. "
Octavio Paz
Woman
Worship
Love
" The characteristic feature of modernity is criticism: what is new is set over and against what is old, and it is this constant contrast that constitutes the continuity of tradition. "
Octavio Paz
New
Tradition
Over
" 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. "
Octavio Paz
Objects
Change
Language
" 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. "
Octavio Paz
Alone
World
Opening
" 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
Search
Aim
Time
" All poems say the same thing, and each poem is unique. Each part reproduces the others, and each part is different. "
Octavio Paz
Unique
Say
Others
" Poems - crystallizations of the universal play of analogy, transparent objects which, as they reproduce the mechanism and the rotary motion of analogy, are waterspouts of new analogies. "
Octavio Paz
Universal
Play
Motion
" Fixity is always momentary. But how can it always be so? If it were, it would not be momentary - or would not be fixity. "
Octavio Paz
Momentary
How
Were
" As it defines itself, every society defines other societies. That definition almost always takes the form of a condemnation: the 'other' is the barbarian. "
Octavio Paz
Almost
Always
Society
" 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
More
Censorship
Kind
" Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society. "
Octavio Paz
Know
You
Writers
" 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. "
Octavio Paz
People
Nature
Growth
" 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
Us
Natural
Poet
" 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. "
Octavio Paz
Same
Realize
Door
" An understanding of Sor Juana's work must include an understanding of the prohibitions her work confronts. Her speech leads us to what cannot be said, what cannot be said to an orthodoxy, the orthodoxy to a tribunal, and the tribunal to a sentence. "
Octavio Paz
Work
Understanding
Speech
" 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. "
Octavio Paz
Reality
Far
History
" Any reflection about poetry should begin, or end, with this question: who and how many read poetry books? "
Octavio Paz
Question
Books
End
" 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
" 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
" In each verse, a decision awaits us, and we can't choose to close our eyes and let instinct work on its own. Poetic instinct consists of an alert tension. "
Octavio Paz
Own
Decision
Choose