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

— Octavio Paz

Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone, and the only one who seeks out another. His nature - if that word can be used in reference to man, who has ‘invented’ himself by saying ‘no’ to nature - consists in his longing to realize himself in another. Man is nostalgia and a search for communion. Therefore, when he is aware of himself he is aware of his lack of another, that is, of his solitude.

— Octavio Paz

Surrealism is not a poetry but a poetics, and even more, and more decisively, a world vision.

— Octavio Paz

Technology is neutral and sterile. Now, technology is the nature of modern man; it is our environment and our horizon. Of course, every work of man is a negation of nature, but at the same time, it is a bridge between nature and us. Technology changes nature in a more radical and decisive manner: it throws it out.

— Octavio Paz

The American War of Independence is the expulsion of the intrusive elements, alien to the American essence. If American reality is the reinvention of itself, whatever is found in any way irreducible or unassimilable is not American.

— Octavio Paz

The blue light of the rising moon fell on the rocks and the scant forest of the taiga, revealing each projecting rock, each tree in a peculiar fashion, different from the way they looked by day. Everything seemed real but different from in the daytime. It was as if the world had a second face, a nocturnal face.

— Octavio Paz

The idea of modernity is beginning to lose its vitality. It is losing it because modernity is no longer a critical attitude but an accepted, codified convention.

— Octavio Paz

The object of poetic activity is essentially language: whatever his beliefs & convictions, the poet is more concerned with words than what these words designate.

— Octavio Paz

There was only one huge world with no back to ITA world like a sun One day it broke into tiny pieces They were the words of the language we now speak Pieces that will never come together Broken mirrors where the world sees itself shattered

— Octavio Paz

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.

— Octavio Paz