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

"Love is an attempt at penetrating another being, but it can only succeed if the surrender is mutual."
— Octavio Paz

"Mineral cactai,
quicksilver lizards in the adobe walls,
the bird that punctures space,
thirst, tedium, clouds of dust,
impalpable epiphanies of wind.
The pines taught me to talk to myself.
In that garden I learnedto send myself off.
Later there were no gardens. "
— Octavio Paz (A Draft of Shadows, and Other Poems)

"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."
— Octavio Paz (An Erotic Beyond: Sade)

"Ser uno mismo es, siempre, llegar a ser ese otro que somos y que llevamos escondido en nuestro interior, más que nada como promesa o posibilidad de ser."
— Octavio Paz (El Laberinto de La Soledad: Posdata, Vuelta Al Laberinto de La Soledad)

"It is always difficult to give oneself up; few persons anywhere ever succeed in doing so, and even fewer transcend the possessive stage to know love for what it actually is: a perpetual discovery, and immersion in the waters of reality, an unending re-creation."
— Octavio Paz (The Labyrinth of Solitude: The Other Mexico, Return to the Labyrinth of Solitude, Mexico and the United States, the Philanthropic Ogre)

"Eroticism is first and foremost a thirst for otherness. And the supernatural is the supreme otherness. This is perhaps the most noble aim of poetry, to attach ourselves to the world around us, to turn desire into love, to embrace, finally what always evades us, what is beyond, but what is always there – the unspoken, the spirit, the soul."
— Octavio Paz (The Other Voice: Essays on Modern Poetry)

"Es indudable que hoy se lee más que antes. ¿Se lee mejor? Lo dudo. La distracción es nuestro estado habitual. No la distracción del que se aleja del mundo para internarse en el secreto y movedizo país de su fantasía, sino la de aquel que está siempre fuera de sí, perdido en la mediocre e insensata agitación cotidiana. Mil cosas solicitan a la vez nuestra atención y ninguna de ellas logra retenernos; así la vida se nos vuelve arena entre los dedos y las horas humo en el cerebro. "
— Octavio Paz

"No one behind, no one ahead.
The path the ancients cleared has closed.
And the other path, everyone's path,
easy and wide, goes nowhere.
I am alone and find my way."
— Octavio Paz

"Erotic acts are instinctive; they fulfill a role in nature. The idea is familiar, but it is one that contains a paradox: there is nothing more natural than sexual desire; there is nothing less natural than the forms in which it is made manifest and satisfied."
— Octavio Paz

"Mil cosas solicitan a la vez nuestra atención y ninguna de ellas logra retenernos; así la vida se nos vuelve arena entre los dedos y las horas humo en el cerebro."
— Octavio Paz

"Las masas humanas más peligrosas son aquellas en cuyas venas ha sido inyectado el veneno del miedo… del miedo al cambio"
— Octavio Paz

"deserve your dream"
— Octavio Paz

"Una civilización que niega a la muerte, acaba por negar a la vida."
— Octavio Paz (El Laberinto de La Soledad: Posdata, Vuelta Al Laberinto de La Soledad)

"Dime cómo mueres y te diré quien eres."
— Octavio Paz (El Laberinto de La Soledad: Posdata, Vuelta Al Laberinto de La Soledad)

"En lugar de interrogarnos a nosotros mismos,¿no sería mejor crear, obrar sobre una realidad que no se entrega al que la contempla, sino al que es capaz de sumergirse en ella?"
— Octavio Paz (El Laberinto de La Soledad: Posdata, Vuelta Al Laberinto de La Soledad)

"Si la soledad del mexicano es la de las aguas estancadas, la del norteamericano es la del espejo. Hemos dejado de ser fuentes."
— Octavio Paz (El Laberinto de La Soledad: Posdata, Vuelta Al Laberinto de La Soledad)

"Merece lo que sueñas."
— Octavio Paz (Libertad Bajo Palabra)

"Pues apenas el tiempo se divide en ayer, hoy y mañana, en horas, minutos y segundos, el hombre cesa de ser uno con el tiempo, cesa de coincidir con el fluir de la realidad."
— Octavio Paz (El laberinto de la soledad: Postdata/Vuelta a "El laberinto de la soledad")

"In this pilgrimage in search of modernity I lost my way at many points only to find myself again. I returned to the source and discovered that modernity is not outside but within us. It is today and the most ancient antiquity; it is tomorrow and the beginning of the world; it is a thousand years old and yet newborn. It speaks in Nahuatl, draws Chinese ideograms from the 9th century, and appears on the television screen. This intact present, recently unearthed, shakes off the dust of centuries, smiles and suddenly starts to fly, disappearing through the window. A simultaneous plurality of time and presence: modernity breaks with the immediate past only to recover an age-old past and transform a tiny fertility figure from the neolithic into our contemporary. We pursue modernity in her incessant metamorphoses yet we never manage to trap her. She always escapes: each encounter ends in flight. We embrace her and she disappears immediately: it was just a little air. It is the instant, that bird that is everywhere and nowhere. We want to trap it alive but it flaps its wings and vanishes in the form of a handful of syllables. We are left empty-handed. Then the doors of perception open slightly and the other time appears, the real one we were searching for without knowing it: the present, the presence."
— Octavio Paz

"a silent concave of puppet buffoons
neither eagles nor jaguars
buzzard lawyers
locuses
wings of ink sawing mindibles
ventriloquist coyotes
peddlers of shadows
beneficent satraps
the cacomistle thief of hens
the monument to the Rattle and its snake
the altar to the mauser and the machete
the mausoleum of the epauletted cayman
rhetoric sculpted in phrases of cement"
— Octavio Paz

"¿Y no es extraordinario que, desaparecidas las causas, persistan los efectos? ¿Y que los efectos oculten a las causas?
"
— Octavio Paz (El Laberinto de La Soledad: Posdata, Vuelta Al Laberinto de La Soledad)

"Si las revoluciones no se hacen con palabras, las ideas no se implantan con decretos."
— Octavio Paz (El Laberinto de La Soledad: Posdata, Vuelta Al Laberinto de La Soledad)

"La historia tiene la realidad atroz de una pesadilla; la grandeza del hombre consiste en hacer obras hermosas y durables con la sustancia real de esa pesadilla."
— Octavio Paz

"...que busca? Tal vez busca su destino. Tal vez su destino es buscar.

...what is he searching for? Perhaps he searches for his destiny. Perhaps his destiny is to search."
— Octavio Paz (El Laberinto De LA Soledad/the Laberynth of Solitud)

"He is astonished at the fact of his being, and this astonishment leads to reflection: as he leans over the river of his consciousness, he asks himself if the face that appears there, disfigured by the water, is his own. The singularity of his being, which is pure sensation in children, becomes a problem and a question"
— Octavio Paz (The Labyrinth of Solitude: The Other Mexico, Return to the Labyrinth of Solitude, Mexico and the United States, the Philanthropic Ogre)

"La palabra del hombre es hija de la muerte.
Hablamos porque somos
mortales: las palabras no son signos. Son años.
Al decir lo que dicen
los nombres que decimos
dicen tiempo: nos dicen,
somos hombres del tiempo.
Conversar es humano."
— Octavio Paz

"¿Y no es extraordinario que, desparecidas las causas, persistan los efectos? ¿Y que los efectos oculten a las causas?"
— Octavio Paz (El Laberinto de La Soledad: Posdata, Vuelta Al Laberinto de La Soledad)

"I thought that the world was a vast system of signs, a conversation between giant beings. My actions, the cricket's saw, the star's blink, were nothing but pauses and syllables, scattered phrases from that dialogue. What word could it be, of which I was only a syllable? Who speaks the word? To whom is it spoken?"
— Octavio Paz

"Entre el lenguaje, ser por naturaleza social, y el escritor, que sólo engendra en la soledad, se establece así una relación muy extraña: gracias al escritor el lenguaje amorfo, horizontal, se yergue e individualiza; gracias al lenguaje, el escritor moderno, rotas las otras vías de comunicación con su pueblo y su tiempo, participa en la vida de la Ciudad."
— Octavio Paz (El Laberinto de La Soledad: Posdata, Vuelta Al Laberinto de La Soledad)

"
Art is an invention of aesthetics, which in turn is an invention of philosophers... What we call art is a game. "
— Octavio Paz

"Al escribir "historia" me refiero a la general o universal. No hay otra: lo que se llama "historia patria" es espejo del hombre -y entonces es también universal- o es una anécdota de sobremesa."
— Octavio Paz