Octavio Paz

"History is a conversation with the dead."

"Philosophy is the art of living well."

"Literature preserves the experience of being human."

"Politics determines how we live together."

"War is the poetry of the base and the brutal."

"Motivation flows from love of what we do."

"Inspiration is grace meeting preparation."

"Relationships demand honesty and vulnerability."

"Gratitude opens the doors of the heart."

"Perseverance is patience extended over time."

"The poet's task is to imagine that which does not yet exist and make it visible through words."

"Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition."

"Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone."

"We are condemned to kill time, thus we die bit by bit."

"The present is perpetually transformed into the past, and the future perpetually into the present."

"Memory is a form of imagination."

"Eroticism is a bridge between being and nothingness."

"The mask is the instrument of transformation."

"Every date is a celebration of human continuity."

"The dialogue between cultures is the dialogue between ourselves."

"Tradition is not the worship of ashes but the preservation of fire."

"Politics is the art of the possible, yet sometimes the impossible is necessary."

"Violence is the rupture of meaning."

"We are our memory; we are our oblivion."

"The labyrinth of solitude is our condition."

"Art is the mediator of the unsayable."

"Love is an attempt to change a piece of a dream into reality."

"The wheel of history turns, but we are the ones turning it."

"Imagination is more real than reality itself."

"Freedom is not something that can be given; it must be taken."