Mexican - Poet | March 31, 1914 - April 19, 1998
In each verse, a decision awaits us, and we can't choose to close our eyes and let instinct work on its own. Poetic instinct consists of an alert tension.
Octavio Paz
WorkEyesDecisionChooseOwnUs
Art is an invention of aesthetics, which in turn is an invention of philosophers... What we call art is a game.
ArtGameInventionTurnCallWhich
Social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings.
CriticismGrammarSocialBegins
The world stretches before me, the vast world of the big, the little, and the medium.
MeWorldLittleBigBeforeVast
The Mexican succumbs very easily to sentimental effusions, and therefore he shuns them.
MexicanSentimentalHeVeryThem
In the United States, man does not feel that he has been torn from the center of creation and suspended between hostile forces. He has built his own world, and it is built in his own image: it is his mirror. But now he cannot recognize himself in his inhuman objects, nor in his fellows.
MirrorManWorldFeelNowCreation
In antiquity, a woman might be an object of worship or desire, but never of love.
LoveWomanDesireNeverWorship
Art for Duchamp, all the arts, obey the same law: meta-irony is inherent in their very spirit. It is an irony that destroys its own negation and, hence, returns in the affirmative.
ArtLawSpiritIronySameOwn
Perhaps things are not things but words: metaphors, words for other things.
WordsThingsOtherMetaphorsPerhaps
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.
WarIndependenceRealityAmerican
Words are things, but things which mean. We cannot do away with meaning without doing away with signs, that is, with language itself. Moreover, we would have to do away with the universe. All the things man touches are impregnated with meaning.
WordsManLanguageUniverseDoing
As it defines itself, every society defines other societies. That definition almost always takes the form of a condemnation: the 'other' is the barbarian.
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