Quotes by Octavio Paz

It may seem paradoxical to say that we have been expelled from the present, but it is a feeling we have all had at some moment. Some of us experienced it first as a condemnation, later transformed into consciousness and action. The search for the present is neither the pursuit of an earthly paradise nor that of a timeless eternity: it is the search for a real reality.
We pursue her in her incessant metamorphoses yet we never manage to trap her. She always escapes: each encounter ends in flight. We embrace her and she disappears immediately: it was just a little air. It is the instant, that bird that is everywhere and nowhere. We want to trap it alive but it flaps its wings and vanishes in the form of a handful of syllables. We are left empty-handed. Then the doors of perception open slightly and the other time appears, the real one we were searching for without knowing it: the present, the presence.

What does one who journeys in a foreign land find traveling back to her native country? The place of her birth or of her end? Perhaps she is searching for her destiny. Perhaps her destiny is to search.

¿Qué busca el peregrino al recorrer su patria? ¿El lugar de su nacimiento o el de su fin? Tal vez busca su destino. Tal vez su destino es buscar.

A flower without a stem, is beauty waiting to die. A heart without love, is a tear waiting to cry.

What sets worlds in motion is the interplay of differences, their attractions and repulsions; life is plurality, death is uniformity.

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

watching I watch myself what I see is my creation as though entering through my eyes perception is conception into an eye more crystal clear water of thoughts what I watch watches me I am the creation of what I see

To love is to battle, to open doors. The world changes if two can look at each other and see.

Wisdom lies neither in fixity nor in change, but in the dialectic between the two.