Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" 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. "

Octavio Paz

Mexican

Complacent

Character

Related Quotes:

" Social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings. "

" All of us, at some moment, have had a vision of our existence as something unique, untransferable and very precious. This revelation almost always takes place during adolescence. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" We are condemned to kill time, thus we die bit by bit. "

" 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. "

" Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

Octavio Paz

Big

Little

" 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

" 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. "

" Walt Whitman is the only great modern poet who does not seem to experience discord when he faces his world. Not even solitude - his monologue is a universal chorus. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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

Always

" 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. "

" To us, the value of a work lies in its newness: the invention of new forms, or a novel combination of old forms, the discovery of unknown worlds or the exploration of unfamiliar areas in worlds already discovered - revelations, surprises. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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

" 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. "

" 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. "