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.

Octavio Paz

Octavio Paz

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Art is an invention of aesthetics, which in turn is an invention of philosophers... What we call art is a game.

— Octavio Paz

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The relations between rhetoric and ethics are disturbing: the ease with which language can be twisted is worrisome, and the fact that our minds accept these perverse games so docilely is no less cause for concern.

— Octavio Paz

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I think we all have our own personality, unique and distinctive, and at the same time, I think that our own unique and distinctive personality blends with the wind, with the footsteps in the street, with the noises around the corner, and with the silence of memory, which is the great producer of ghosts.

— Octavio Paz

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Abstract painting seeks to be a pure pictorial language, and thus attempts to escape the essential impurity of all languages: the recourse to signs or forms that have meanings shared by everyone.

— Octavio Paz

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When we learn to speak, we learn to translate.

— Octavio Paz

communicationindividualityloneliness