Octavio Paz

“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.”

“The idea of modernity is beginning to lose its vitality. It is losing it because modernity is no longer a critical attitude but an accepted, codified convention.”

“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.”

“Literatures, like trees and plants, are born of a land and in it flourish and die. But literatures, also like plants, may be carried abroad to take root in a foreign soil.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

“A work survives its readers; after a hundred or two hundred years, it is read by new readers who impose on it new modes of reading and interpretation. The work survives because of these interpretations, which are, in fact, resurrections: without them, there would be no work.”

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

“Perhaps things are not things but words: metaphors, words for other things.”

“Deserve your dream.”

“life is other, always there,further off, beyond you andbeyond me, always on the horizon,life which unlives us and makes us strangers,that invents our face and wears it away”

“המאפיין של אמנות מודרנית לעומת אמנויות של תקופות קודמות היא הביקורתיות.”