Solitude lies at the lowest depth of the human condition. Man is the only being who feels himself to be alone and the only one who is searching for the Other.
Octavio PazRead
For a man of my generation, our century has been a long intellectual and political struggle in favor of freedom.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote reflects the struggle for freedom experienced by individuals in a particular generation.
Octavio Paz emphasizes the significant and prolonged battle for intellectual and political freedom faced by his generation. He speaks to the collective experience of those who have fought against oppression and for the rights that allow individuals to think, express, and govern themselves freely.
Themes
FreedomStrugglePoliticalIntellectualGeneration
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about civil rights, one might quote Octavio Paz to highlight the importance of freedom.
More from Octavio Paz
All quotes βBy suppressing differences and peculiarities, by eliminating different civilizations and cultures, progress weakens life and favors death
Octavio PazRead
The North American system only wants to consider the positive aspects of reality. Men and women are subjected from childhood to an inexorable process of adaptation certain principles, contained in brief formulas are endlessly repeated by the Press, the radio, the churches, and the schools, and by those kindly, sinister beings, the North American mothers and wives. A person imprisoned by these schemes is like a plant in a flowerpot too small for it he cannot grow or mature.
Octavio PazRead
Poetry is not a genre in harmony with the modern world; its innermost nature is hostile or indifferent to the dogmas of modern times, progress and the cult of the future.
Octavio PazRead
If we are a metaphor of the universe, the human couple is the metaphor par excellence, the point of intersection of all forces and the seed of all forms. The couple is time recaptured, the return to the time before time.
Octavio PazRead
Man, even man debased by the neocapitalism and pseudosocialism of our time, is a marvelous being because he sometimes speaks. Language is the mark, the sign, not of his fall but of his original innocence. Through the Word we may regain the lost kingdom and recover powers we possessed in the far-distant past.
Octavio PazRead
Similar quotes
To be left alone on the tightrope of youthful unknowing is to experience the excruciating beauty of full freedom and the threat of eternal indecision.
Maya AngelouRead
Chess is a unique battlefield for human minds and computers - human intuition, our creativity, fantasy, our logic, versus the brute force of calculation and a very small portion of accumulated knowledge infused by other human beings. So in chess we can compare these two incompatible things and probably make projections into our future. Is there danger that the human mind will be overshadowed by the power of computers, or we can still survive?
Garry KasparovRead
Fame is not just. She never finely or discriminatingly praises, but coarsely hurrahs.
Henry David ThoreauRead
In the same way, you were happy in spring, With the half colors of quarter-things, The slightly brighter sky, the melting clouds, The single bird, the obscure moon- The obscure moon lighting an obscure world Of thing that would never be quite expressed, Where you yourself were never quite yourself And did not want nor have to be.
Wallace StevensRead
You get racism crossing the street; it's in the very fabric of American society.
Nina SimoneRead
A touchstone to determine the actual worth of an "intellectual" - find out how he feels about astrology.
Robert A. HeinleinRead