“This is perhaps the most noble aim of poetry, to attach ourselves to the world around us, to turn desire into love, to embrace, finally what always evades us, what is beyond, but what is always there – the unspoken, the spirit, the soul.”

—  Octavio Paz

Source: The Other Voice: Essays on Modern Poetry

Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "This is perhaps the most noble aim of poetry, to attach ourselves to the world around us, to turn desire into love, to …" by Octavio Paz?
Octavio Paz photo
Octavio Paz 71
Mexican writer laureated with the 1990 Nobel Prize for Lite… 1914–1998

Related quotes

Maurice Maeterlinck photo

“The future is a world limited by ourselves; in it we discover only what concerns us and, sometimes, by chance, what interests those whom we love the most.”

Maurice Maeterlinck (1862–1949) Belgian playwright, poet, and essayist

Joyzelle, Act i, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“Great poetry is always written by somebody straining to go beyond what he can do.”

Stephen Spender (1909–1995) English poet and man of letters

As quoted in The New York Times (26 March 1961)

Lydia Maria Child photo

“Every human being has, like Socrates, an attendant spirit; and wise are they who obey its signals. If it does not always tell us what to do, it always cautions us what not to do.”

Lydia Maria Child (1802–1880) American abolitionist, author and women's rights activist

Philothea http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/9982 (1836), p. 51 (in EPUB version)
1830s

Robert Greene photo
Gertrude Stein photo
Jacques Derrida photo
Johannes Tauler photo

“This food of love draws the soul above distinction or difference, beyond resemblance to divine unity. This is what happens to the transfigured spirit.”

Johannes Tauler (1300–1361) German theologian

When the divine heat of love has drawn out all the moisture, heaviness, unfitness, then this holy food plunges such a one into the life of God. As Our Lord himself said to St Augustine, "I am the food of the strong: believe and feast on me. You will not change me into yourself; rather you will be changed into me".
Sermons, From Our Daily Bread

Albert Camus photo
Francis Escudero photo

“Which bring us back to my original question: What is wrong with us? Why do we Filipinos always shoot ourselves in the foot?”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

2009, Speech: The Socio-Economic Peace Program of Senator Francis Escudero

Martin Amis photo

Related topics