Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone.
loneliness man men solitude
'Art' is an invention of aesthetics, which in turn is an invention of philosophers. What we call art is a game.
invention
What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism.
age art criticism modernity
What sets worlds in motion is the interplay of differences, their attractions and repulsions. <br/><br/>Life is plurality, death is uniformity. <br/><br/>By suppressing differences and pecularities, by eliminating different civilizations and cultures, progress weakens life and favors death. <br/><br/>The ideal of a single civilization for everyone, implicit in the cult of progress and technique, impoverishes and mutilates us. <br/><br/>Every view of the world that becomes extinct, every culture that disappears, diminishes a possibility of life
culture life
Love is an attempt at penetrating another being, but it can only succeed if the surrender is mutual.
tso-love
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
culture language society
Everything is language.
language philosophy things
.. Because two bodies, naked and entwined, leap over time, they are invulnerable, nothing can touch them, they return to the source. There is no you, no I, no tomorrow, no yesterday, no names, the truth of twoin a single body, a single soul, oh total being..
poetry tso-love
Mineral cactai, quicksilver lizards in the adobe walls, the bird that punctures space, thirst, tedium, clouds of dust, impalpable epiphanies of wind. The pines taught me to talk to myself. In that garden I learnedto send myself off. Later there were no gardens.
mexico octavio-paz poetry
When we learn to speak, we learn to translate.
communication individuality loneliness selfhood solitude
I thought that the world was a vast system of signs, a conversation between giant beings. My actions, the cricket's saw, the star's blink, were nothing but pauses and syllables, scattered phrases from that dialogue. What word could it be, of which I was only a syllable? Who speaks the word? To whom is it spoken?
meaning
El amor es intensidad y por esto es una distensión del tiempo: estira los minutos y los alarga como siglos.
amor
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.
history humannature language literature nature silence
Wisdom lies neither in fixity nor in change, but in the dialectic between the two.
change life wisdom
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.
force thetimes time