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.”

“...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.”

“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.”

“Las masas humanas más peligrosas son aquellas en cuyas venas ha sido inyectado el veneno del miedo… del miedo al cambio”

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

“Love is an attempt to penetrate another being, but it can only be realized if the surrender is mutual.”

“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.”

“a silent concave of puppet buffoonsneither eagles nor jaguarsbuzzard lawyerslocuseswings of ink sawing mindiblesventriloquist coyotespeddlers of shadowsbeneficent satrapsthe cacomistle thief of hensthe monument to the Rattle and its snakethe altar to the mauser and the machetethe mausoleum of the epauletted caymanrhetoric sculpted in phrases of cement”

“Merece lo que sueñas.”

“Deserve your dream.”

“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.”

“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. ”

“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.”