Octavio Paz

“Deserve your dream.”
― Octavio Paz

“Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone.”
― Octavio Paz

“Love is an attempt to penetrate another being, but it can only be realized if the surrender is mutual.”
― Octavio Paz , The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings

“Beyond myself, somewhere,
I wait for my arrival.”
― Octavio Paz, The Collected Poems, 1957-1987

“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, Sunstone/Piedra De Sol

“I don't believe that there are dangerous writers: the danger of certain books is not in the books themselves but in the passions of their readers.”
― Octavio Paz, An Erotic Beyond: Sade

“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, The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings

“No one behind, no one ahead.
The path the ancients cleared has closed.
And the other path, everyone's path,
easy and wide, goes nowhere.
I am alone and find my way.”
― Octavio Paz

“Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone, and the only one who seeks out another. His nature - if that word can be used in reference to man, who has ‘invented’ himself by saying ‘no’ to nature - consists in his longing to realize himself in another. Man is nostalgia and a search for communion. Therefore, when he is aware of himself he is aware of his lack of another, that is, of his solitude.”
― Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings

“Self-discovery is above all the realization that we are alone.”
― Octavio Paz

“listen to me as one listens to the rain,
the years go by, the moments return,
do you hear the footsteps in the next room?
not here, not there: you hear them
in another time that is now,
listen to the footsteps of time,
inventor of places with no weight, nowhere,
listen to the rain running over the terrace,
the night is now more night in the grove,
lightning has nestled among the leaves,
a restless garden adrift-go in,
your shadow covers this page.”
― Octavio Paz

“To love is to undress our names.”
― Octavio Paz

“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, The Other Voice: Essays on Modern Poetry

“When we learn to speak, we learn to translate.”
― Octavio Paz

“a human being is never what he is but the self he seeks.”
― Octavio Paz

“...que busca? Tal vez busca su destino. Tal vez su destino es buscar.

...what is he searching for? Perhaps he searches for his destiny. Perhaps his destiny is to search.”
― Octavio Paz, El laberinto de la soledad

“Una civilización que niega a la muerte, acaba por negar a la vida.”
― Octavio Paz, El laberinto de la soledad - Postdata - Vuelta a "El laberinto de la soledad"

“Erotic acts are instinctive; they fulfill a role in nature. The idea is familiar, but it is one that contains a paradox: there is nothing more natural than sexual desire; there is nothing less natural than the forms in which it is made manifest and satisfied.”
― 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, Alternating Current

“Love is the revelation of the other person's freedom.”
― Octavio Paz

“All is visible and all elusive,
all is near and can’t be touched.”
― Octavio Paz

“Mineral cactai,
quicksilver lizards in the adobe walls,
the bird that punctures space,
thirst, tedium, clouds of dust,
impalpable epiphanies of wind.
The pines taught me to talk to myself.
In that garden I learned to send myself off.
Later there were no gardens. ”
― Octavio Paz, A Draft of Shadows and Other Poems

“In this pilgrimage in search of modernity I lost my way at many points only to find myself again. I returned to the source and discovered that modernity is not outside but within us. It is today and the most ancient antiquity; it is tomorrow and the beginning of the world; it is a thousand years old and yet newborn. It speaks in Nahuatl, draws Chinese ideograms from the 9th century, and appears on the television screen. This intact present, recently unearthed, shakes off the dust of centuries, smiles and suddenly starts to fly, disappearing through the window. A simultaneous plurality of time and presence: modernity breaks with the immediate past only to recover an age-old past and transform a tiny fertility figure from the neolithic into our contemporary. We pursue modernity in her incessant metamorphoses yet we never manage to trap her. She always escapes: each encounter ends in flight. We embrace her and she disappears immediately: it was just a little air. It is the instant, that bird that is everywhere and nowhere. We want to trap it alive but it flaps its wings and vanishes in the form of a handful of syllables. We are left empty-handed. Then the doors of perception open slightly and the other time appears, the real one we were searching for without knowing it: the present, the presence.”
― Octavio Paz

“My body, plowed by your body, will turn into a field where one is sown and a hundred reaped.”
― Octavio Paz