Octavio Paz

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

The American War of Independence is the expulsion of the intrusive elements, alien to the American essence. If American reality is the reinvention of itself, whatever is found in any way irreducible or unassimilable is not American.

The characteristic feature of modernity is criticism: what is new is set over and against what is old, and it is this constant contrast that constitutes the continuity of tradition.

Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone.

We are condemned to kill time, thus we die bit by bit.

Modern man likes to pretend that his thinking is wide-awake. But this wide-awake thinking has led us into the mazes of a nightmare in which the torture chambers are endlessly repeated in the mirrors of reason.

A flower without a stem, is beauty waiting to die. A heart without love, is a tear waiting to cry.

When a society decays, it is language that is first to become gangrenous. As a result, social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings

My body, plowed by your body, will turn into a field where one is sown and a hundred reaped.