292 Quotes by Octavio Paz

Surrealism is not a school of poetry but a movement of liberation... A way of rediscovering the language of innocence, a renewal of the primordial pact, poetry is the basic text, the foundation of the human order. Surrealism is revolutionary because it is a return to the beginning of all beginnings.

By diminishing the value of silence, publicity has also diminished that of language. The two are inseparable: knowing how to speak has always meant knowing how to keep silent, knowing that there are times when one should say nothing.

Power immobilizes; it freezes with a single gesture-grandiose, terrible, theatrical, or finally, simply monotonous-the variety which is life.

The whole motley confusion of acts, omissions, regrets and hopes which is the life of each one of us finds in death, not meaning or explanation, but an end.

We must cultivate and defend particularity, individuality, and irregularity-life. Human beings do not have a future in the collectivism of bureaucratic states or in the mass society created by capitalism. Every system, by virtue as much of its abstract nature as of its pretension to totality, is the enemy of life. As a forgotten Spanish poet, José Moreno Villa, put it with melancholy wit: "I have discovered in symmetry the root of much iniquity."

Grace is gratuitous; it is a gift.

The past reappears because it is a hidden present.

Love is the revelation of the other person’s freedom.

Human nature is universial, and it endures through all cultures and epochs. This is the secret of perenniality of certain poems and books.