Octavio Paz Quotes on Time
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 time, drawn from across the philosopher's works.
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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“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 present: I wanted to belong to my time and to my century. A little later this obsession became a fixed idea: I wanted to be a modern poet. My search for modernity had begun.”
Nobel Lecture (8 December 1990) -
“If we are a metaphor of the universe , the human couple is the metaphor par excellence, the point of intersection of all forces and the seed of all forms. The couple is time recaptured, the return to the time before time.”
Alternating Current(1967) | André Breton or the Quest of the Beginning