1001Philosophers

Octavio Paz Quotes on Knowledge

Octavio Paz was a Mexican poet, essayist, and diplomat and one of the foremost Latin American writers of the twentieth century. This page collects quotes attributed to Octavio Paz on the topic of knowledge, drawn from across the philosopher's works.

Quotes

  • “Wisdom lies neither in fixity nor in change, but in the dialectic between the two.”

    Ch. 2
  • Attributed to Octavio Paz:

    “Modernity began as a critique of religion, philosophy, morality, law, history, economics, and politics.”

  • “Merece lo que sueñas.”

    Deserve your dream . "Hacia el Poema (Puntos de Partida)" [Toward the Poem (Starting Points)] (1950) | Variant translation: Deserve what you dream.
  • “Variant translation: Deserve what you dream.”

    Merece lo que sueñas.
  • “There can be no society without poetry , but society can never be realized as poetry, it is never poetic. Sometimes the two terms seek to break apart. They cannot.”

    Signs in Rotation" (1967) in The Bow and the Lyre : The Poem, The Poetic Revelation, Poetry and History (1973) as translated by Ruth L.C. Simms, p. 249
  • “Nobel Lecture (8 December 1990)”

    Only now have I understood that there was a secret relationship between what I have called my expulsion from the present and the writing of poetry . Poetry is in love with the instant and seeks to relive it in the poem, thus separating it from sequential time and turning it into a fixed present. But at that time I wrote without wondering why I was doing it. I was searching for the gateway to the p
  • “To fight evil is to fight ourselves.”

    Itinerary (1994)
  • “If you are the amber mare”

    Wikiquote
  • “Motion", as translated by Eliot Weinberger, in Collected Poems 1957-1987”

    Wikiquote
  • “Between going and staying the day wavers,”

    Wikiquote