Octavio Paz Quotes

Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions.

Mostly, I straddle reality and the imagination. My reality needs imagination like a bulb needs a socket. My imagination needs reality like a blind man needs a cane.

I think the answer of course is that space and time are not these hard external objects. Again we're, scientists have been building from one side of nature (physics) without considering the other side (life in consciousness). Neither side exists without the other. They cannot be divorced from one another or else there is no reality.

Without consciousness, space and time are nothing.

The world is given to me only once, not one existing and one perceived. Subject and object are only one. The barrier between them cannot be said to have broken down as a result of recent experience in the physical sciences, for this barrier does not exist.

When we look for things there is nothing but mind, and when we look for mind there is nothing but things.

We have been so blinded by thinking and feeling that we have never seen the World.

My hand feels touched as well as it touches; reality says this, and nothing more.

Mind cannot think without duality. Duality is the way of thinking. In silence, all dualities disappear.

The observer is the observed.

Once you become aware of your own body and its movements, you will be surprised that you are not your body. This is something of a basic principle, that if you can watch something then you are not it. You are the watcher, not the watched. You are the observer, not the observed. How can you be both?

It is clear that every immediate object of our senses both exists and is real in the primary meaning of these terms so long as we remain aware of the object.

The world is... the natural setting of, and field for, all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions. Truth does not inhabit only the inner man, or more accurately, there is no inner man, man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself.

Time is the element that controls the consciousness, the very being of the people.

The simple fact of existence, of being aware that you are aware; this to me is the most astounding fact.

When you see things upside down, the ego can be extraordinarily funny; it's absurd. But it's tragic at the same time.

Get to know other worlds, if only for comparison. I am near, too near for him to dream of me.

When I used to perform weddings, the image I always had was the image of a triangle, in which there are two partners and then there is this third force, this third being, that emerges out of the interaction of these two. The third one is the one that is the shared awareness that lies behind the two of them.

There are moments of existence when time and space are more profound, and the awareness of existence is immensely heightened.

The extent of your consciousness is limited only by your ability to love and to embrace with your love the space around you, and all it contains.

I wish the children could be taught early on that our thinking creates our experience.

Sober up, and you see and hear everything you'd been able to avoid hearing before.

Life is only a dream and we are the imagination of ourselves.

I have vanity and greed enough for one person. But at the same time, I feel in my bones you lose a lot of life's value if you don't see yourself as a member of the family of man.

When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.