292 Quotes by Octavio Paz

Man, it seems to me, is not in history: he is history.

It may seem paradoxical to say that we have been expelled from the present, but it is a feeling we have all had at some moment. Some of us experienced it first as a condemnation, later transformed into consciousness and action. The search for the present is neither the pursuit of an earthly paradise nor that of a timeless eternity: it is the search for a real reality.

Perhaps things are not things but words: metaphors, words for other things.

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

Solitude is the profoundest fact

Without democracy freedom is a chimera

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

Revolt is the violence of an entire people; rebellion the unruliness of an individual or an uprising by a minority; both are spontaneous and blind. Revolution is both planned and spontaneous, a science and an art.

Surrealism is not a poetry but a poetics, and even more, and more decisively, a world vision.