“The poetic experience, like the religious one, is a mortal leap: a change of nature that is also a return to our original nature. Hidden by the profane or prosaic life, our being suddenly remembers its lost identity; and then that “other” that we are appears, emerges. Poetry and religion are a revelation. But the poetic word dispenses with divine authority. The image is sustained by itself, without the need to appeal to rational demon stration or to the protection of a supernatural power: it is the revelation of himself that man makes to himself. The religious word, on the contrary, aims to reveal a mystery that is, by definition, alien to us.”
Octavio Paz
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Religion
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“Literature is the expression of a feeling of deprivation, a recourse against a sense of something missing. But the contrary is also true: language is what makes us human. It is a recourse against the meaningless noise and silence of nature and history.”
Octavio Paz
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Literature
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“Sexuality is animal; it is a natural function, whereas eroticism develops within society. The former belongs to the realm of biology, the latter to that of culture. Its essence is the imaginary: eroticism is a metaphor of sexuality. There is a dividing line between eroticism and sexuality–the word like. Eroticism is a representation, a ceremony of transfiguration: men and women make love like lions, eagles, doves, or praying mantises; neither lions nor praying mantises make love like human beings. We humans see ourselves in animals; animals do not see themselves in humans. By contemplating itself, humanity changes itself and changes sexuality. Eroticism is not brute sex but sex transfigured by the imagination.”
Octavio Paz
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Sex
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“Art is an invention of aesthetics, which in turn is an invention of philosophers… What we call art is a game.”
Octavio Paz
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Art
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“The religion of art, like the religion of politics, was born from the ruins of Christianity. Art inherited from the old religion the power of consecrating things and endowing them with a sort of eternity; museums are our temples, and the objects displayed in them are beyond history. Politics–or more precisely, Revolution–co-opted the other function of religion: changing human beings and society. Art was an asceticism, a spiritual heroism; Revolution was the construction of a universal church.”
Octavio Paz
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Art
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“Social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings.”
Octavio Paz
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Criticism
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“Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society.”
Octavio Paz
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Writing
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“We are condemned to kill time, thus we die bit by bit.”
Octavio Paz
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Time
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“Wisdom lies neither in fixity nor in change, but in the dialectic between the two.”
Octavio Paz
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Change
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“What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism.”
Octavio Paz
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Art
