The 30 best quotes by Octavio Paz, the unrepeatable Mexican poet.

Verses and reflections of the 1990 Nobel Prize in Literature.

A Mexican who transported us to new worlds. The great Octavio Paz (Mexico City 1914 - 1998) was a remarkable poet, writer and thinker who is recognizedwriter and thinker who is recognized as one of the best authors of the 20th century.

Born in the midst of the Mexican Revolution, he lived in the United States during his childhood, only to return to his native Mexico as a child. He wrote throughout his career, combining works of poetry, prose and translations.

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Octavio Paz's famous quotes and quotations

Nonconformist and owner of an incomparable style, Octavio Paz influenced a whole generation of artists and thinkers. This led him to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1990.

In today's article we are going to know the best thoughts, statements and famous phrases of Octavio Paz.

1. The unreality of what is looked at gives reality to the gaze.

Everything is based on the point of view, and on knowing how to interpret what we see.

2. Light is the time that is thought.

Extracted from one of his most beautiful poems.

3. A society possessed by the frenzy to produce more in order to consume more tends to turn ideas, feelings, art, love, friendship and people themselves into objects of consumption.

A critique of the consumer society and the poverty of art that emanates from it.

4. To love is to strip oneself of names.

Goodbye labels, welcome love.

5. Everything is today. Everything is present. Everything is, everything is here. But everything is also elsewhere and in another time. Out of itself and full of itself...

Octavio Paz's thought always forces us to review our vision of existence.

6. You have to sleep with your eyes open, you have to dream with your hands... you have to dream out loud, you have to sing until the song grows roots, trunks, branches, twigs, birds, stars...

One of Octavio Paz's most famous and remembered verses.

7. The protection given to marriage could be justified if society truly allowed choice. Since it does not, it must be accepted that marriage does not constitute the highest realization of love, but is a juridical, social and economic form that has ends other than those of love.

Reflecting on the love and culture behind marriage.

8. In sexuality, pleasure serves procreation; in erotic rituals pleasure is an end in itself or has ends other than procreation.

One of Octavio Paz's phrases in which he inquires about human sexuality.

9. Love is a feeling that can only be born before a free being, who can give us or withdraw his presence.

Certainly, if love is not in full freedom, it cannot be love.

10. Poetry makes us touch the impalpable and listen to the tide of silence covering a landscape devastated by insomnia.

Another of his literary pearls, in this case with a metaphor only worthy of his magnificent pen.

11. To love: to make a soul a body, to make a body a soul, to make a you of a presence.

A beautiful phrase about love.

12. To love is to fight, to open doors, to stop being a ghost with a perpetual number condemned by a faceless master.

Transgression linked to love in a society of fools and corrupt.

13. Pride is the vice of the powerful.

What are arrogant people like? We tell you in this article.

14. We love a mortal being as if he were immortal.

Feelings can lead us into unreasonable territory, especially in the field of love.

15. Without freedom, democracy is despotism; without democracy, freedom is a chimera.

On the way society is governed.

16. In female relationships, pecking, envy, gossip, jealousy and petty perfidy are frequent. All this is due, almost certainly, not to an innate inability of women but to their social situation.

A criticism of women, but not because they are women, but because they have been victims of oppression for centuries.

17. The revolutions of the twentieth century were and are, precisely, the seedbed of democracies. They have been a cruel response of history to Marx's predictions: the revolution that would put an end to the State has not only strengthened it but has created a social group that is, at the same time, its creature and its owner.

A personal view on the historical events of the last century.

18. Once upon a time, face to face with myself, my face fell apart in front of the mirror: was it my own face, that icy reflection of nothingness?

A question Octavio Paz has often asked himself.

19. Love is an attraction to a unique person: to a body and a soul. Love is choice; eroticism is acceptance.

On eroticism and its conditioning factors.

20. For the Mexican, life is a possibility to fuck or to be fucked.

An irreverent phrase to describe the class society in Mexico.

21. Man, tree of images, words that are flowers that are fruits that are acts.

Another excerpt from his best poems.

22. Sacrifices and offerings appease or buy gods and patron saints; gifts and feasts, the people.

Panem et circenses, a maxim also portrayed by Octavio Paz.

23. The profound meaning of social protest consists in having opposed the implacable phantom of the future to the spontaneous reality of the now.

A revolutionary phrase that confronts yearnings and realities.

24. To live well requires to die well. We must learn to look death in the face.

About facing death with decision and humanity.

25. More difficult than despising money is to resist the temptation to do works or to transform oneself into a work.

Reflections on the crematistic and on art.

26. None is the absence of our glances, the pause of our conversation, the reticence of our silence.

The pen of Octavio Paz left us absolutely unforgettable verses.

27. Love is born of a crush; friendship of frequent and prolonged exchange. Love is instantaneous; friendship requires time.

An excellent reflection on the psychological mechanisms that facilitate the different types of relationships between human beings.

Our instruments can measure time but we can no longer think about it: it has become too big and too small.

A sentence about time and our battered perception of the course of time.

29. In a world made in the image of men, women are only a reflection of male will and desire.

A phrase about the prevailing machismo in the West.

30. To awaken to history means to become aware of our singularity, a moment of reflective repose before giving ourselves to action.

The reflection that precedes the action, to set ourselves towards an uncertain future.