292 Quotes by Octavio Paz

Una persona “sufrida” es menos sensible al dolor que las que apenas si ha sido tocadas por la adversidad.

I do not condemn the cult of pleasure; I lament the general vulgarity.

Si las revoluciones no se hacen con palabras, las ideas no se implantan con decretos.

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.

Progress has peopled history with the marvels and monsters of technology but it has depopulated the life of man. It has given us more things but not more being.

Solitude is the profoundest fact.

Desire turns us into ghosts.

Therefore the fiesta is not only an excess, a ritual squandering of the goods painfully accumulated during the rest of the year; it is also a revolt, a sudden immersion in the formless, in pure being. By means of the fiesta society frees itself from the norms it has established. It ridicules its gods, its principles, and its laws: it denies its own self.

Without democracy freedom is a chimera.