45 Motivational Octavio Paz Quotes For Success In Life

Octavio Paz Lozano was a Mexican poet and diplomat. For his body of work, he was awarded the 1981 Miguel de Cervantes Prize, the 1982 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, and the 1990 Nobel Prize in Literature. This Octavio Paz Quotes on love, life, etc will motivate you.

Best Octavio Paz Quotes

1. The Mexican…is familiar with death. [He] jokes about it, caresses it, sleeps with it, celebrates it. It is one of his favorite toys and his most steadfast love. ~ Octavio Paz
2. What sets worlds in motion is the interplay of differences, their attractions, and repulsions. Life is plurality, death is uniformity. By suppressing differences and peculiarities, by eliminating different civilizations and cultures, progress weakens life and favors death. The ideal of a single civilization for everyone, implicit in the cult of progress and technique, impoverishes and mutilates us. Every view of the world that becomes extinct, every culture that disappears, diminishes a possibility of life ~ Octavio Paz
3. Beyond myself, somewhere, I wait for my arrival. ~ Octavio Paz

4. Deserve your dream. ~ Octavio Paz

5. A flower without a stem is beauty waiting to die. A heart without love is a tear waiting to cry. ~ Octavio Paz
6. The universe unfolds in the body, which is its mirror and its creature. ~ Octavio Paz
7. Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone. ~ Octavio Paz
8. To love is to battle, to open doors, to cease to be a ghost with a number forever in chains, forever condemned by a faceless master; the world changes if two look at each other and see. ~ Octavio Paz
9. Love is not a desire for beauty; it is a yearning for completion. ~ Octavio Paz
10. The supreme value is not the future but the present. The future is a deceitful time that always says to us, ‘Not Yet,’ and thus denies us… Whoever builds a house for future happiness builds a prison for the present. ~ Octavio Paz
11. Distraction is our habitual state. Not the distraction of the person who withdraws from the world in order to shut himself up in the secret and ever-changing land of his fantasy, but the distraction of the person who is always outside himself, lost in the trivial, senseless, turmoil of everyday life. ~ Octavio Paz Quotes
12. My body, plowed by your body, will turn into a field where one is sown and a hundred reaped. ~ Octavio Paz

13. The purpose of poetry is to restore to mankind the possibility to wonder. ~ Octavio Paz

14. A civilization that denies death ends by denying life. ~ Octavio Paz
15. Believing ourselves to be possessors of absolute truth degrades us: we regard every person whose way of thinking is different from ours as a monster and a threat and by so doing turn our own selves into monsters and threats to our fellows. ~ Octavio Paz
16. Light is time thinking about itself. ~ Octavio Paz

17. Every moment is nothing without end. ~ Octavio Paz

18. It is always difficult to give oneself up; few persons anywhere ever succeed in doing so, and even fewer transcend the possessive stage to know love for what it actually is: a perpetual discovery, and immersion in the waters of reality, an unending re-creation. ~ Octavio Paz
19. To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears. ~ Octavio Paz
20. To love is to undress our names. ~ Octavio Paz
21. Reality is a staircase going neither up nor down, we don’t move; today is today, always is today. ~ Octavio Paz
22. Grace is gratuitous; it is a gift. ~ Octavio Paz
23. The American: a titan enamored of progress, a fanatical giant who worships “getting things done” but never asks himself what he is doing nor why he is doing it. ~ Octavio Paz
24. By suppressing differences and peculiarities, by eliminating different civilizations and cultures, progress weakens life and favors death ~ Octavio Paz
25. What characterizes a poem is its necessary dependence on words as much as its struggle to transcend them. ~ Octavio Paz
26. Today we all speak, if not the same tongue, the same universal language. There is no one center, and time has lost its former coherence: East and West, yesterday and tomorrow exist as a confused jumble in each one of us.

27. Different times and different spaces are combined in a here and now that is everywhere at once. ~ Octavio Paz

28. Eroticism is first and foremost a thirst for otherness. And the supernatural is the supreme otherness. This is perhaps the most noble aim of poetry, to attach ourselves to the world around us, to turn desire into love, to embrace, finally what always evades us, what is beyond, but what is always there – the unspoken, the spirit, the soul. ~ Octavio Paz
29. There is nothing sacred or untouchable except the freedom to think. Without criticism, that is to say, without rigor and experimentation, there is no science, without criticism there is no art or literature. I would also say that without criticism there is no healthy society. ~ Octavio Paz
30. To fight evil is to fight ourselves. ~ Octavio Paz
31. Because two bodies, naked and entwined, leap over time, they are invulnerable, nothing can touch them, they return to the source. There is no you, no I, no tomorrow, no yesterday, no names, the truth of two in a single body, a single soul, oh total being. ~ Octavio Paz
32. Love is an attempt at penetrating another being, but it can only succeed if the surrender is mutual. ~ Octavio Paz

33. Love is born at first sight; the friendship of a frequent and lengthy exchange. ~ Octavio Paz

34. 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? To learn the art of remaining motionless amid the agitation of the whirlwind, to learn to remain still and to be as transparent as this fixed light amid the frantic branches this may be a program for life. ~ Octavio Paz
35. Beyond happiness or unhappiness, though it is both things, love is intensity; it does not give us eternity but life, that second in which the doors of time and space open just a crack: here is there and now is always. ~ Octavio Paz
36. With great difficulty advancing by millimeters each year, I carve a road out of the rock. For millenniums my teeth have wasted and my nails broken to get there, to the other side, to the light and the open air. And now that my hands bleed and my teeth tremble, unsure in a cavity cracked by thirst and dust, I pause and contemplate my work. I have spent the second part of my life breaking the stones, drilling the walls, smashing the doors, removing the obstacles I placed between the light and myself in the first part of my life. ~ Octavio Paz

37. Each time we try to express ourselves we have to break with ourselves. ~ Octavio Paz

38. Solitude is the profoundest fact ~ Octavio Paz
39. We are condemned to kill time, thus we die bit by bit. ~ Octavio Paz
40. Humankind is never what he is but the self he seeks. ~ Octavio Paz
41. Self-discovery is above all the realization that we are alone. ~ Octavio Paz
42. When we learn to speak, we learn to translate. ~ Octavio Paz
43. 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
44. Poetry is not truth, it is the resurrection of presences. ~ Octavio Paz
45. The world is born when two people kiss ~ Octavio Paz

Comment Your Favourite Octavio Paz Quotes