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Beyond Happiness Or Unhappiness, Though It Is Both Things, Love Is Intensity; It Does Not Give Us Eternity But Life, That Second In Which The Doors Of Time And Space Open Just A Crack: Here Is There And Now Is Always.

-Octavio Paz

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Beyond Happiness Or Unhappiness,

Octavio Paz

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Beyond Happiness Or Unhappiness, Though It Is Both Things, Love Is Intensity; It Does Not Give Us Eternity But Life, That Second In Which The Doors Of Time And Space Open Just A Crack: Here Is There And Now Is Always.

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The Purpose Of Poetry Is To Restore To Mankind The Possibility To Wonder.

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Believing Ourselves To Be Possessors Of Absolute Truth Degrades Us: We Regard Every Person Whose Way Of Thinking Is Different From Ours As A Monster And A Threat And By So Doing Turn Our Own Selves Into Monsters And Threats To Our Fellows.

We Pursue Modernity 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.

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.

Loving Means Getting Rid Of Names.

To Love Is To Undress Our Names.

Drugs Are Nihilistic: They Undermine All Values And Radically Overturn All Our Ideas About Good And Evil, What Is Just And What Is Unjust, What Is Permitted And What Is Forbidden.

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.

It Is The Revolution, The Magical Word, The Word That Is Going To Change Everything, That Is Going To Bring Us Immense Delight And A Quick Death.

Solitude Is The Profoundest Fact Of The Human Condition. Man Is The Only Being Who Knows He Is Alone.

We Are Condemned To Kill Time, Thus We Die Bit By Bit.

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The American: A Titan Enamored Of Progress, A Fanatical Giant Who Worships "getting Things Done" But Never Asks Himself What He Is Doing Nor Why He Is Doing It.

Whatever Is Not Stone Is Light

Two Opposing Forces Inhabit The Poem: One Of Elevation Or Up-rooting, Which Pulls The Word From The Language: The Other Of Gravity, Which Makes It Return. The Poem Is An Original And Unique Creation, But It Is Also Reading And Recitation: Participation. The Poet Creates It; The People, By Recitation, Re-create It. Poet And Reader Are Two Moments Of A Single Reality.

It Is Not Proper To Project Our Feelings Onto Things Or To Attribute Our Own Sensations And Passions To Them. Can It Also Be Improper To See In Them A Guide, A Way Of Life? To Learn The Art Of Remaining Motionless Amid The Agitation Of The Whirlwind, To Learn To Remain Still And To Be As Transparent As This Fixed Light Amid The Frantic Branches This May Be A Program For Life.

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Love Is The Revelation Of The Other Person's Freedom.

To Fight Evil Is To Fight Ourselves.

Solitude Is The Profoundest Fact

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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.

Art Is What Remains Of Religion: The Dance Above The Yawning Abyss.

For Every Language That Becomes Extinct, An Image Of Man Disappears.

What Characterizes A Poem Is Its Necessary Dependence On Words As Much As Its Struggle To Transcend Them.

With Great Difficulty Advancing By Millimeters Each Year, I Carve A Road Out Of The Rock. For Millenniums My Teeth Have Wasted And My Nails Broken To Get There, To The Other Side, To The Light And The Open Air. And Now That My Hands Bleed And My Teeth Tremble, Unsure In A Cavity Cracked By Thirst And Dust, I Pause And Contemplate My Work. I Have Spent The Second Part Of My Life Breaking The Stones, Drilling The Walls, Smashing The Doors, Removing The Obstacles I Placed Between The Light And Myself In The First Part Of My Life.

When A Society Decays, It Is Language That Is First To Become Gangrenous. As A Result, Social Criticism Begins With Grammar And The Re-establishing Of Meanings

The Beloved Is Already In Our Being, As Thirst And "otherness." Being Is Eroticism. Inspiration Is That Strange Voice That Takes Man Out Of Himself To Be Every Thing That He Is, Everything That He Desires; Another Body, Another Being. Beyond, Outside Of Me, In The Green And Gold Thicket, Among The Tremulous Branches, Sings The Unknown. It Calls To Me.

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No One Behind, No One Ahead. The Path The Ancients Cleared Has Closed. And The Other Path, Everyone's Path, Easy And Wide, Goes Nowhere. I Am Alone And Find My Way.

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Language Lies Outside Of Society Because It Is Its Foundation; But It Also Lies Within Society Because That Is The Only Place Where It Exists And The Only Place Where It Develops.

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.

My Body, Plowed By Your Body, Will Turn Into A Field Where One Is Sown And A Hundred Reaped.

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Beyond Happiness Or Unhappiness, Though It Is Both Things, Love Is Intensity; It Does Not Give Us Eternity But Life, That Second In Which The Doors Of Time And Space Open Just A Crack: Here Is There And Now Is Always.

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If Society Abolishes Poetry It Commits Spiritual Suicide.

The Universe Unfolds In The Body, Which Is Its Mirror And Its Creature.

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A Civilization That Denies Death Ends By Denying Life.

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Death Is The Mother Of Forms.

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Solitude Lies At The Lowest Depth Of The Human Condition. Man Is The Only Being Who Feels Himself To Be Alone And The Only One Who Is Searching For The Other.

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Love Is An Attempt At Penetrating Another Being, But It Can Only Succeed If The Surrender Is Mutual.

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Possibility Of Change

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Power Immobilizes; It Freezes With A Single Gesture-grandiose, Terrible, Theatrical, Or Finally, Simply Monotonous-the Variety Which Is Life.

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Every View Of The World That Becomes Extinct, Every Culture That Disappears, Diminishes A Possibility Of Life

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.

When We Learn To Speak, We Learn To Translate.

The Value Of E-commerce Is Not In The E, But In The Commerce.

Love Is Not A Desire For Beauty; It Is A Yearning For Completion.

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