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Octavio Paz

Octavio Paz Lozano (March 31, 1914-April 19, 1998) was a Mexican writer, poet, and diplomat, and the winner of the 1990 Nobel Prize for Literature

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Today we all speak, if not the same tongue, the same universal language. There is no one center, and time has lost its former coherence: East and West, yesterday and tomorrow exist as a confused jumble in each one of us. Different times and different spaces are combined in a here and now that is everywhere at once.

– Octavio Paz

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

– Octavio Paz

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'Art' is an invention of aesthetics, which in turn is an invention of philosophers. What we call art is a game.

– Octavio Paz

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Literature is the expression of a feeling of deprivation, a recourse against a sense of something missing. But the contrary is also true: language is what makes us human. It is a recourse against the meaningless noise and silence of nature and history.

– Octavio Paz

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

– Octavio Paz

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Man does not speak because he thinks; he thinks because he speaks. Or rather, speaking is no different than thinking: to speak is to think.

– Octavio Paz

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Man, even man debased by the neocapitalism and pseudosocialism of our time, is a marvelous being because he sometimes speaks. Language is the mark, the sign, not of his fall but of his original innocence. Through the Word we may regain the lost kingdom and recover powers we possessed in the far-distant past.

– Octavio Paz

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Modern man likes to pretend that his thinking is wide-awake. But this wide-awake thinking has led us into the mazes of a nightmare in which the torture chambers are endlessly repeated in the mirrors of reason.

– Octavio Paz

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Social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings.

– Octavio Paz

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

– Octavio Paz

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The North American system only wants to consider the positive aspects of reality. Men and women are subjected from childhood to an inexorable process of adaptation; certain principles, contained in brief formulas are endlessly repeated by the Press, the radio, the churches, and the schools, and by those kindly, sinister beings, the North American mothers and wives. A person imprisoned by these schemes is like a plant in a flowerpot too small for it: he cannot grow or mature.

– Octavio Paz

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