Octavio Paz Quotes on Knowledge
Octavio Paz (1914–1998), the Mexican poet and essayist who received the 1990 Nobel Prize, gave Spanish-American letters of the second half of the twentieth century one of its most sustained meditations on poetry as a distinctive form of knowing. The Bow and the Lyre (1956) and the later Children of the Mire (1974) treat poetic language as the domain in which the historical, mythical, and erotic dimensions of human experience can be brought into a unified articulation that discursive knowledge cannot reach. The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) extends the framework to a meditation on Mexican history and identity.
Quotes
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“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.”
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“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”
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“Motion", as translated by Eliot Weinberger, in Collected Poems 1957-1987”
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“Between going and staying the day wavers,”
Wikiquote