Octavio Paz Quotes

To live alone is the fate of all great souls.

I'm very social, and in a place like New York, even if you're alone on the subway, you never feel lonely.

I hate being alone, even for 10 minutes.

You can be much more alone with other people than you are by yourself. Even if it's people you love.

I had friends but I was spending a great deal of my time alone and for me that was vital because there's an awful lot you learn about yourself when you're alone.

I never got to go to prom. I never went to regular school. I ate lunch by myself.

A man by himself is in bad company.

Show me a man who lives alone and has a perpetually clean kitchen, and 8 times out of 9 I'll show you a man with detestable spiritual qualities.

In N.Y. you're always around people, but in L.A. you can go days without seeing anyone.

No matter how famous and established they were or however blessed they were with great songs or long careers, if they lived alone, they lived alone. That's not the way I wanted to live prior to the tour or after.

The eternal quest of the individual human being is to shatter his loneliness.

I don't like being alone.

Solitude is pleasant. Loneliness is not.

As a child, I spent a lot of time alone. I used to sit in my closet with one cracker. I'd pretend that I was on the North Pole freezing to death, and I had to somehow survive on this one tiny cracker.

Absolutely lonely people have few personal interactions of any kind.

I don't want to be alone, I want to be left alone.

Pray that your loneliness may spur you into finding something to live for, great enough to die for.

On the broad spectrum of solitude, I lean toward the extreme end: I work alone, as well as live alone, so I can pass an entire day without uttering so much as a hello to another human being. Sometimes a day's conversation consists of only five words, uttered at the local Starbucks: 'Large coffee with milk, please.'

I regretted the solitary nature of the writer's life - other people, normal working people, spent their days with co-workers, rode the subway home with a crowd, walked through thronged streets. I worked at home, all by myself.

There is no pleasure to me without communication: there is not so much as a sprightly thought comes into my mind that it does not grieve me to have produced alone, and that I have no one to tell it to.

It is great folly to wish to be wise all alone.

I was always such a people-watcher. I would sit on street corners alone and watch people and make up stories about them in my head. Then, all of a sudden, I was the one being watched.

Better be alone than in bad company.

I am tired, beloved, of chafing my heart against the want of you; of squeezing it into little ink drops, and posting it. And I scald alone, here, under the fire of the great moon.

Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone.