Quotes by Octavio Paz

• 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.
• Wisdom lies neither in fixity nor in change, but in the dialectic between the two.
• What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism.
• We are condemned to kill time, thus we die bit by bit.
• To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears.
• Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society.
• Love is an attempt at penetrating another being, but it can only succeed if the surrender is mutual.
• 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.
• 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.
• Deserve your dream.
• Art is an invention of aesthetics, which in turn is an invention of philosophers... What we call art is a game.
• Social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings.
• Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone.