Octavio Paz Quotes

Self-discovery is above all the realization that we are alone.

Life is for each man a solitary cell whose walls are mirrors.

You discover who you truly are only when you live alone.

To have passed through life and never experienced solitude is to have never known oneself. To have never known oneself is to have never known anyone.

We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will.

When even the most strictly logical mind looks round and investigates the phenomena attending its own existence, perhaps the first fact to attract attention by its strongly marked prominence is the remarkable loneliness of man. He stands alone.

My real guru are my experiences in life - the realisation that you are alone in this world came very early to me.

We are never the same with others as when we are alone. We are different, even when we are in the dark with them.

But there comes a moment in everybody's life when he must decide whether he'll live among the human beings or not - a fool among fools or a fool alone.

I was quite a different child, I felt isolated. In time, that level of being with yourself crystallises who you are, and you can see what other people are without being blinded by what they want from you.

It took living alone for me to really get to know myself.

In solitude, where we are least alone.

I think it's good for a person to spend time alone. It gives them an opportunity to discover who they are and to figure out why they are always alone.

I think a person needs to learn from childhood to find himself alone. It means to not be bored when you’re by yourself, because a person who finds himself bored when alone –as it seems to me– is in danger.

If you are never alone, you cannot know yourself.

I had been alone more than I could have been had I gone by myself.

Self-reflection, or - what comes to the same thing - the urge to individuation, gathers together what is scattered and multifarious and exalts it to the original of the One, the Primordial Man. In this way our existence as separate beings, our former ego nature, is abolished, the circle of consciousness is widened, and because the paradoxes have been made conscious, the sources of conflict are dried up.

I look for myself but find no one. I belong to the chrysanthemum hour of bright flowers placed in tall vases. I should make an ornament of my soul.

We do not know our own souls, let alone the souls of others. Human beings do not go hand in hand the whole stretch of the way. There is a virgin forest in each; a snowfield where even the print of birds' feet is unknown. Here we go alone, and like it better so. Always to have sympathy, always to be accompanied, always to be understood would be intolerable.

When it comes to the important things one is always alone.

What are we when we are alone? Some, when they are alone, cease to exist.

Solitude is the furnace of transformation. Without solitude we remain victims of our society and continue to be entangled in the illusions of the false self.

In what concerns you much, do not think that you have companions: know that you are alone in the world.

In the end, as you get older and older, your life is your life, and you are alone with it.