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. - Octavio Paz 1 Share Now -
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. - Octavio Paz 2 Share Now -
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. - Octavio Paz 3 Share Now -
Technology is neutral and sterile. Now, technology is the nature of modern man; it is our environment and our horizon. Of course, every work of man is a negation of nature, but at the same time, it is a bridge between nature and us. Technology changes nature in a more radical and decisive manner: it throws it out. - Octavio Paz 4 Share Now -
To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears. - Octavio Paz 7 Share Now -
Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone. - Octavio Paz 8 Share Now -
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. - Octavio Paz 9 Share Now -
Surrealism is not a poetry but a poetics, and even more, and more decisively, a world vision. - Octavio Paz 10 Share Now -
