Octavio Paz Zitate auf Englisch

Zitat des Tages von Octavio Paz:

Poetry, whatever the manifest content of the poem, is always a violation of the rationalism and morality of bourgeois society.

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.

Octavio Paz

Wisdom lies neither in fixity nor in change, but in the dialectic between the two.

Octavio Paz

I think we all have our own personality, unique and distinctive, and at the same time, I think that our own unique and distinctive personality blends with the wind, with the footsteps in the street, with the noises around the corner, and with the silence of memory, which is the great producer of ghosts.

Octavio Paz

It has always surprised me that in a world of relations as hard as that of the United States, cordiality constantly springs out like water from an unstanchable fountain.

Octavio Paz

Art is an invention of aesthetics, which in turn is an invention of philosophers... What we call art is a game.

Octavio Paz

Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone.

Octavio Paz

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.

Octavio Paz

The work of art is always unfaithful to its creator... Art lays at a higher level; it says something more, and almost always, it says something different from what the artist wanted to say.

Octavio Paz

Love is an attempt at penetrating another being, but it can only succeed if the surrender is mutual.

Octavio Paz

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

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.

Octavio Paz

What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism.

Octavio Paz

Sensation is amphibious: at the same time it joins us to and divides us from things. It is the door through which we enter into things but also through which we come out of them and realize that we are not things.

Octavio Paz

Little by little, not without astonishment, I rediscovered the great names of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, who had been the master thinkers of my grandfather and other Mexican liberals. They did no offer me a doctrine or a catechism: they were and they are a source, an inspiration.

Octavio Paz

The sound of water is worth more than all the poets' words.

Octavio Paz

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

Octavio Paz

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

The minority of Mexicans who are aware of their own selves do not make up a closed or unchanging class. They are the only active group, in comparison with the Indian-Spanish inertia of the rest, and ever day they are shaping the country more and more into their own image.

Octavio Paz

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

Octavio Paz

Picasso is what is going to happen and what is happening; he is posterity and archaic time, the distant ancestor and our next-door neighbor. Speed permits him to be two places at once, to belong to all the centuries without letting go of the here and now.

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

Deserve your dream.

Octavio Paz

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

The relations between rhetoric and ethics are disturbing: the ease with which language can be twisted is worrisome, and the fact that our minds accept these perverse games so docilely is no less cause for concern.

Octavio Paz

In the works of Duchamp, space begins to walk and take on form; it becomes a machine that spins arguments and philosophizes; it resists movement with delay and delay with irony.

Octavio Paz

We are condemned to kill time, thus we die bit by bit.

Octavio Paz

Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society.

Octavio Paz

It is not proper to project our feelings onto things or to attribute our own sensations and passions to them. Can it also be improper to see in them a guide, a way of life?

Octavio Paz

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

Octavio Paz

For the Chinese, the Greeks, the Mayans, or the Egyptians, nature was a living totality, a creative being. For this reason, art, according to Aristotle, is imitation; the poet imitates the creative gesture of nature.

Octavio Paz

The truth is that the history of Mexico is a history in the image of its geography: abrupt and tortuous. Each historical period is like a plateau surrounded by tall mountains and separated from the other plateaus by precipices and divides.

Octavio Paz

Fixity is always momentary. But how can it always be so? If it were, it would not be momentary - or would not be fixity.

Octavio Paz

The modern tradition is the tradition of revolt. The French Revolution is still our model today: history is violent change, and this change goes by the name of progress. I do not know whether these notions really apply to art.

Octavio Paz

In order for sensation to accede to the objectivity of things, it must itself be changed into a thing. The agent of change is language: the sensations are turned into verbal objects.

Octavio Paz

The Mexican succumbs very easily to sentimental effusions, and therefore he shuns them.

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.

Octavio Paz