Octavio Paz

The universe unfolds in the body, which is its mirror and its creature.

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."

Whatever is not stone is light

The work of art is always unfaithful to its creator... Art lays at a higher level; it says something more, and almost always, it says something different from what the artist wanted to say.

In the United States, man does not feel that he has been torn from the center of creation and suspended between hostile forces. He has built his own world, and it is built in his own image: it is his mirror. But now he cannot recognize himself in his inhuman objects, nor in his fellows.

Poetry is not truth, it is the resurrection of presences.

Man does not speak because he thinks; he thinks because he speaks. Or rather, speaking is no different than thinking: to speak is to think.

No one is alone, and each change here brings about another change there.

The modern tradition is the tradition of revolt. The French Revolution is still our model today: history is violent change, and this change goes by the name of progress. I do not know whether these notions really apply to art.

Art for Duchamp, all the arts, obey the same law: meta-irony is inherent in their very spirit. It is an irony that destroys its own negation and, hence, returns in the affirmative.

Despite the often illusory nature of essays on the psychology of a nation, it seems to me there is something revealing in the insistence with which a people will question itself during certain periods of its growth.

The idea of modernity is beginning to lose its vitality. It is losing it because modernity is no longer a critical attitude but an accepted, codified convention.

In antiquity, a woman might be an object of worship or desire, but never of love.

For a man of my generation, our century has been a long intellectual and political struggle in favor of freedom.

Man is alone everywhere. But the solitude of the Mexican, under the great stone night of the high plateau that is still inhabited by insatiable gods, is very different from that of the North American, who wanders in an abstract world of machines, fellow citizens and moral precepts.

To the poet fated to be a poet, self-expression is as natural and as involuntary as breathing is to us ordinary mortals.

We twentieth-century Mexicans, even those of pure Indian descent, look on the pre-Columbian world as a world on the other side, not only distant in time but across the cultural divide.

What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism.

To be a great painter means to be a great poet: someone who transcends the limits of his language.

As it defines itself, every society defines other societies. That definition almost always takes the form of a condemnation: the 'other' is the barbarian.

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