FastSaying

Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone. - The Labyrinth of Solitude, 1950.


Octavio Paz

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More Octavio Paz

I think we all have our own personality, unique and distinctive, and at the same time, I think that ...
OCTAVIO PAZ To us, the value of a work lies in its newness: the invention of new forms, or a novel combination o...
OCTAVIO PAZ We are condemned to kill time, thus we die bit by bit.
OCTAVIO PAZ The sound of water is worth more than all the poets' words.
OCTAVIO PAZ The modern tradition is the tradition of revolt. The French Revolution is still our model today: his...
OCTAVIO PAZ Man is alone everywhere. But the solitude of the Mexican, under the great stone night of the high pl...
OCTAVIO PAZ The idea of modernity is beginning to lose its vitality. It is losing it because modernity is no lon...
OCTAVIO PAZ Our judgment and moral categories, our idea of the future, our opinions about the present or about j...
OCTAVIO PAZ Technology is neutral and sterile. Now, technology is the nature of modern man; it is our environmen...
OCTAVIO PAZ Wisdom lies neither in fixity nor in change, but in the dialectic between the two. A constant coming...
OCTAVIO PAZ The truth is that the history of Mexico is a history in the image of its geography: abrupt and tortu...
OCTAVIO PAZ Self-discovery is above all the realization that we are alone: it is the opening of an impalpable, t...
OCTAVIO PAZ To be a great painter means to be a great poet: someone who transcends the limits of his language.
OCTAVIO PAZ Man, it seems to me, is not in history: he is history.
OCTAVIO PAZ Wisdom lies neither in fixity nor in change, but in the dialectic between the two.
OCTAVIO PAZ To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears.
OCTAVIO PAZ The work of art is always unfaithful to its creator... Art lays at a higher level; it says something...
OCTAVIO PAZ Modern man likes to pretend that his thinking is wide-awake. But this wide-awake thinking has led us...
OCTAVIO PAZ The North American system only wants to consider the positive aspects of reality. Men and women are ...
OCTAVIO PAZ Social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings.
OCTAVIO PAZ Today we all speak, if not the same tongue, the same universal language. There is no one center, and...
OCTAVIO PAZ Man, even man debased by the neocapitalism and pseudosocialism of our time, is a marvelous being bec...
OCTAVIO PAZ Art is an invention of aesthetics, which in turn is an invention of philosophers. What we call art i...
OCTAVIO PAZ Literature is the expression of a feeling of deprivation, a recourse against a sense of something mi...
OCTAVIO PAZ Man does not speak because he thinks; he thinks because he speaks. Or rather, speaking is no differe...
OCTAVIO PAZ If we are a metaphor of the universe, the human couple is the metaphor par excellence, the point of ...
OCTAVIO PAZ What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism.
OCTAVIO PAZ "What sets worlds in motion is the interplay of differences, their attractions and repulsions. Life ...
OCTAVIO PAZ Technology is not an image of the world but a way of operating on reality. The nihilism of technolog...
OCTAVIO PAZ Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone...
OCTAVIO PAZ Yes, I am well aware that nature - or what we call nature: that totality of objects and processes th...
OCTAVIO PAZ All of us, at some moment, have had a vision of our existence as something unique, untransferable an...
OCTAVIO PAZ Art is an invention of aesthetics, which in turn is an invention of philosophers... What we call art...
OCTAVIO PAZ The relations between rhetoric and ethics are disturbing: the ease with which language can be twiste...
OCTAVIO PAZ Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society.
OCTAVIO PAZ Little by little, not without astonishment, I rediscovered the great names of the eighteenth and nin...
OCTAVIO PAZ In each verse, a decision awaits us, and we can't choose to close our eyes and let instinct work...
OCTAVIO PAZ When hypocrisy is a character trait, it also affects one's thinking, because it consists in the ...
OCTAVIO PAZ For the Chinese, the Greeks, the Mayans, or the Egyptians, nature was a living totality, a creative ...
OCTAVIO PAZ Picasso is what is going to happen and what is happening; he is posterity and archaic time, the dist...
OCTAVIO PAZ If contemporary artists sincerely seek to be original, unique, and new, they should begin by disrega...
OCTAVIO PAZ As it defines itself, every society defines other societies. That definition almost always takes the...
OCTAVIO PAZ Deserve your dream.
OCTAVIO PAZ Wit invents; inspiration reveals. The inventions of wit are conceits - metaphors and paradoxes - tha...
OCTAVIO PAZ In the works of Duchamp, space begins to walk and take on form; it becomes a machine that spins argu...
OCTAVIO PAZ Futurists wanted to suggest movement by means of a dynamic painting; Duchamp applies the notion of d...
OCTAVIO PAZ Art for Duchamp, all the arts, obey the same law: meta-irony is inherent in their very spirit. It is...
OCTAVIO PAZ Walt Whitman is the only great modern poet who does not seem to experience discord when he faces his...
OCTAVIO PAZ The object of poetic activity is essentially language: whatever his beliefs and convictions, the poe...
OCTAVIO PAZ We twentieth-century Mexicans, even those of pure Indian descent, look on the pre-Columbian world as...
OCTAVIO PAZ Love is an attempt at penetrating another being, but it can only succeed if the surrender is mutual.
OCTAVIO PAZ Beyond happiness or unhappiness, though it is both things, love is intensity; it does not give us et...
OCTAVIO PAZ What sets worlds in motion is the interplay of differences, their attractions and repulsions. Life i...
OCTAVIO PAZ To the poet fated to be a poet, self-expression is as natural and as involuntary as breathing is to ...
OCTAVIO PAZ The minority of Mexicans who are aware of their own selves do not make up a closed or unchanging cla...
OCTAVIO PAZ The American War of Independence is the expulsion of the intrusive elements, alien to the American e...
OCTAVIO PAZ "What sets worlds in motion is the interplay of differences, their attractions and repulsions.
...
OCTAVIO PAZ Despite the often illusory nature of essays on the psychology of a nation, it seems to me there is s...
OCTAVIO PAZ A work survives its readers; after a hundred or two hundred years, it is read by new readers who imp...
OCTAVIO PAZ Perhaps things are not things but words: metaphors, words for other things.
OCTAVIO PAZ Poetry is not a genre in harmony with the modern world; its innermost nature is hostile or indiffere...
OCTAVIO PAZ Nuestra muerte ilumina nuestra vida. Si nuestra muerte carece de sentido, tampoco lo tuvo nuestra vi...
OCTAVIO PAZ ...chases after it, mocks it, courts it, hugs it, sleeps with it; it is his favorite plaything and h...
OCTAVIO PAZ Poetry, whatever the manifest content of the poem, is always a violation of the rationalism and mora...
OCTAVIO PAZ I don't believe that there are dangerous writers: the danger of certain books is not in the books th...
OCTAVIO PAZ Abstract painting seeks to be a pure pictorial language, and thus attempts to escape the essential i...
OCTAVIO PAZ A saint speaks with God or with himself, two forms of silence.
OCTAVIO PAZ An unread author is an author who is a victim of the worst kind of censorship, indifference - a cens...
OCTAVIO PAZ Merece lo que sueñas.
OCTAVIO PAZ Poems - crystallizations of the universal play of analogy, transparent objects which, as they reprod...
OCTAVIO PAZ When we learn to speak, we learn to translate.
OCTAVIO PAZ Surrealism is not a poetry but a poetics, and even more, and more decisively, a world vision.
OCTAVIO PAZ In the United States, man does not feel that he has been torn from the center of creation and suspen...
OCTAVIO PAZ An understanding of Sor Juana's work must include an understanding of the prohibitions her work ...
OCTAVIO PAZ la admiración por el Padre, símbolo de lo cerrado y agresivo, capaz de chingar y abrir, se transpa...
OCTAVIO PAZ Beyond myself, somewhere,
I wait for my arrival.
OCTAVIO PAZ I have to respect what they say, but I think I'll be in the game before June. It depends on how I do...
OCTAVIO DOTEL Asian people have a unique way about them and a different sense of beauty. It's exotic to me. I ...
PAZ VEGA I don't want to play only Latin women. I want to have roles in English.
PAZ VEGA I'm not the new Penelope Cruz. I'm Paz Vega. There's only one Penelope and she's mar...
PAZ VEGA My ambition is to not have to work any more. In 10 years I want to stop, and I want to be living wit...
PAZ VEGA People in Seville are very happy, the lifestyle here is very relaxed, you can walk everywhere; it...
PAZ VEGA We have been making steady progress in moving this institute forward.
HAROLD PAZ There are individuals and families desperate for new discoveries and the possibility of treatments a...
HAROLD PAZ [People from] the U.S. miss out in learning about this. There are many things in common in all citie...
FRANCISCO PAZ Residents in the area said they heard an explosion. Air rescue teams are traveling to the area right...
FRANCISCO PAZ The plane went out of control and crashed. There are no survivors.
FRANCISCO PAZ Residents in the area said they heard an explosion.
FRANCISCO PAZ Unfortunately, there were no survivors from this accident.
FRANCISCO PAZ They asked what kind of problems they were having, and the pilots indicated that it was a technical ...
FRANCISCO PAZ This process took place mainly after September 11 and it became the main field of activity at least ...
REUVEN PAZ I love biker chicks!
PAZ DE LA HUERTA I love Frida Kahlo.
PAZ DE LA HUERTA I love going to the hair salon. I'm Spanish. I think it's more of a Latina thing to go to th...
PAZ DE LA HUERTA I think I'm attracted to outlaws because they make me feel safe inside, like a little child.
PAZ DE LA HUERTA If I collect anything, it's lingerie.
PAZ DE LA HUERTA Women have said the most malicious, disgusting things about me. But I know that when somebody commen...
PAZ DE LA HUERTA I don't ever wear makeup. I steam my face. I put hot water to open pores and cold water to close...
PAZ DE LA HUERTA