Octavio Paz Quotes

It's something that you pick up at a history class in college, the idea that history and time is something to which we can't even hold a candle to. We, as human beings, are just a small element in the overarching sweep of narrative history. That really had a profound effect on me, that realization.

People don't alter history any more than birds alter the sky, they just make brief patterns in it.

History is one of those marvelous and necessary illusions we have to deal with. It's one of the ways of dealing with our world with impossible generalities which we couldn't live without.

So I have cultivated the vast garden of human experience which is history, without troubling myself overmuch about laws, essential first causes, or how it is all coming out.

History can show you that it was one pile of bad stuff after another. It can also show you that there's been tremendous progress in knowledge, behaviour, laws, civilisation. It cannot show you that there was a meaning behind it.

It is of course the nature of historical contraction that the shortest distance to a historical destination is never a straight line.

I believe that history has shape, order, and meaning; that exceptional men, as much as economic forces, produce change; and that passe abstractions like beauty, nobility, and greatness have a shifting but continuing validity.

Every human life involves an unfathomable mystery, for man is the riddle of the universe, and the riddle of man in his endowment with personal capacities.

What Shakespeare and the Greeks were able to do was radically question what it meant to be a human being.

If we compare the present time with former ages, we find that the same tendencies and desires have at all times governed states and peoples.

Men live in history as never before …. we make and change history minute by minute. History is not the book or the human memory. We do history in the morning and change it after lunch.

I love and I'm intrigued by what history does to people and to subjects that matter.

The passion for the past is clearly about more than market forces or government policies. History responds to a variety of needs, from greater understanding of ourselves and our world to answers about what to do.

Men make history, not the other way around.

Because we are in the world, we are condemned to meaning, and we cannot do or say anything without its acquiring a name in history.

Historical! Must it be historical to catch your attention? Even though historicity, like notoriety, denotes nothing more than thatsomething has occurred.

In the last analysis, the essential thing is the life of individual. This alone makes history, here alone do the great transformations take place, and the whole future, the whole history of the world, ultimately springs as a gigantic summation from these hidden source in individuals.

History is the queen of the humanities. It teaches wisdom and humility, and it tells us how things change through time.

The whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano key.

That's why history is not an answer to our problem, because history complicates, enlarges every problem of human existence. Now, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries didn't believe this.

I shall cheerfully bear the reproach of having descended below the dignity of history.

History, in illuminating the past, illuminates the present, and in illuminating the present, illuminates the future.

I'm not an artist. An artist makes an object. Me, it's not an object, I work in history, I'm a storyteller.

Man's greatest concern is to know how he shall properly fill his place in the universe and correctly understand what he must be in order to be a man.

I love the ordered mind of history because it takes us out of the chaos, momentarily, and says, "Ah, so this is the story we are engaged in."