Great Throughts Treasury

"Liberal society is paralyzed if it becomes self-criticism."

"It may seem paradoxical to say that we have been expelled from the present, but it is a feeling we have all had at some moment. Some of us experienced it first as a condemnation, later transformed into consciousness and action. The search for the present is neither the pursuit of an earthly paradise nor that of a timeless eternity: it is the search for a real reality."

"Love is born with an arrow; Friendship frequent and prolonged exchange."

"Language lies outside of society because it is its foundation; but it also lies within society because that is the only place where it exists and the only place where it develops."

"Love is intensity and this is a relaxation time. Stretches and lengthens the minutes as ever."

"Love is one of the answers humankind invented to stare death in the face: time ceases to be a measure, and we can briefly know paradise."

"Made by hand, the craft object bears the fingerprints, real or metaphorical, of the person who fashioned it. These fingerprints are not the equivalent of the artist's signature, for they are not a name. Nor are they a mark or a brand. They are a sign: the almost invisible scar commemorating our original brotherhood or sisterhood. Made by hand, the craft object is made for hands. Not only can we see it, we can also finger it, feel it. We see the work of art but we do not touch it. The religious taboo that forbids us to touch saints?you'll burn your hands if you touch the Tabernacle, we were told as children?also applies to paintings and sculpture."

"Love is an attempt at penetrating another being, but it can only succeed if the surrender is mutual."

"Love is the revelation of the other person's freedom."

"Mato hunger to love, to devour what you find."

"Man, even man debased by the neo-capitalism and pseudo-socialism of our time, is a marvelous being because he sometimes speaks. Language is the mark, the sign, not of his fall but of his original innocence. Through the Word we may regain the lost kingdom and recover powers we possessed in the far-distant past."

"Mineral cactai, quicksilver lizards in the adobe walls, the bird that punctures space, thirst, tedium, clouds of dust, impalpable epiphanies of wind. The pines taught me to talk to myself. In that garden I learned to send myself off. Later there were no gardens."

"No use going out or staying at home. No use erecting walls against the impalpable. A mouth will extinguish all the fires, a doubt will root up all the decisions. It will be everywhere without being anywhere. It will blur all the. mirrors. Penetrating walls and convictions, vestments and well-tempered souls, it will install itself in the marrow of everyone. Whistling between body and body, crouching between soul and soul. And all the wounds will open because, with expert and delicate, although somewhat cold, hands, it will irritate sores and pimples, will burst pustules and swellings and dig into the old, badly healed wounds. Oh fountain of blood, forever inexhaustible! Life will be a knife, a gray and agile and cutting and exact and arbitrary blade that falls and slashes and divides. To crack, to claw, to quarter, the verbs that move with giant steps against us! It is not the sword that shines in the confusion of what will be. It is not the saber, but fear and the whip. I speak of what is already among us. Everywhere there are trembling and whispers, insinuations and murmurs. Everywhere the light wind blows, the breeze that provokes the immense Whiplash each time it unwinds in the air. Already many carry the purple insignia in their flesh. The light wind rises from the meadows of the past, and hurries closer to our time."

"My heart is budding flowers in the middle of the night Poem Azteca"

"Modern man likes to pretend that his thinking is wide-awake. But this wide-awake thinking has led us into the mazes of a nightmare in which the torture chambers are endlessly repeated in the mirrors of reason."

"My hands open the curtains of your being clothe you in a further nudity uncover the bodies of your body My hands invent another body for your body."

"My body, your body plowed by, will turn into a field where one is sown and reaped a hundred."

"Our death illuminates our lives. If our death is meaningless, neither did our life. So when someone dies a violent death, we say, asked for it. And it's true, everyone has sought the death, the death that] If death betrays us and die badly, all lament: we must die as you live. Death is transferable, like life. If we live we die is because it really was not our life we live: not belong to us and not our own bad luck that kills us. Tell me how you die and tell you who you are."

"Our history is full of phrases and episodes that reveal our heroes indifference to pain or danger. From childhood we are taught to suffer defeat with dignity, conception is not without grandeur. And if we are not all stoic and impassive, like Juarez and Cuauhtemoc, at least try to be resigned, and patients suffered. Resignation is one of our popular virtues. More than the brightness of victory, moves us fortitude in adversity."

"Of fantasy, of dreams, and ceremonies."

"Poetry cannot be explained - only to understand."

"Persistent, flowing through fallen shadows, excavating tunnels, drilling silences, Insisting, running under my pillow, brushing past my temples, covering my eyelids with another, intangible skin made ??of air, its wandering nations, its drowsy tribes migrate through the provinces of my body, it crosses, re-crosses under the bridges of my bones, slips into my left ear, spills out from my right, climbs the nape of my neck, turns and turns in my skull, wanders across the terrace of my forehead, conjures visions, scatters them, erases my thoughts one by one with hands of unwetting water, it evaporates them, black emerges tide of pulse-beats, groping forward murmur of water repeating the same meaningless syllable, I hear its sleepwalking delirium losing itself in serpentine galleries of echoes, it comes back, drifts off, eat back, flings itself endlessly off the edges of my cliffs, and I do not stop falling and I fall."

"Quite from the main opinion he held once"

"Rather than interrogate ourselves, would not it be better to create, to work on a reality that is not delivered to the beholder, but who is able to dive into it?"

"Races victims of any foreign power (eg black Americans), engage in combat with a concrete reality. We however, struggle with imaginary entities, vestiges of the past and ghosts generated by ourselves. Those are real ghosts and relics, the least for us... Are untouchable and invincible because they are not outside us but in ourselves... The current Mexican, as we have seen, can be reduced to this:. Mexican not want or dare to be himself"

"Prose is a tardy genre, offspring of thought's distrust of the natural tendencies of language. Poetry belongs to all epochs: it is man's natural form of expression. There are no peoples without poetry; there are some without prose. Therefore, it can be said that prose is not a form of expression inherent in society, while the existence of a society without songs, myths, or other poetic expressions is inconceivable. Poetry knows nothing of progress or evolution, and its beginnings and its end are confused with those of language. Prose, which is primordially a tool of criticism and analysis, requires a slow maturation and is only produced after a long series of efforts aimed at taming speech."

"Reality is a staircase going neither up nor down, we don't move; today is today, always is today."

"Resignation is one of our popular virtues. More than the brightness of victory moves us fortitude in adversity."

"Return earthly life passed before the half, I stopped. He turned his back to the future: There is not waiting for me - and already passed by went. I went out of the number of those who from time immemorial, deceived, expects that the winning fortune, turn the key, the truth is revealed - will open the gates of the century, and someone said: There is no gate and no centuries. I leave behind the streets and squares, and Greek statues - in the cold light of morning, and the wind was living among the tombs. Outside the city - the field and in the fields - and night desert: then my lonely heart - and the desert night. And in the light of the sun, I became stone, mirror and stone. then - left behind the desert - was the sea and over the sea - black sky, a huge stone with Barely words: No stars in me . So - come. Gates are destroyed, and the angel slumbers peacefully. And outside the gates - Garden: thick crown breathing stones, almost alive, magnolia deep sleep, and light - naked among the trunks elegant. Water flows hands-hugging blooming meadow. And in the center - a tree and a girl -child; oh, sunny fire her hair! And nudity is not burdened me: I was in the water and the air is like. Nestled glow green tree, asleep in the grass, it was - left wind white feather. Kissed her I wanted, but the gurgling water suddenly awakened thirst, I leaned over the water mirror and looked at myself. And I saw, mouth distorted thirst, was dead; oh elder hungry for, vine, the agony of fire! I covered her nakedness. And quietly left. Laughed angel. And the wind picked up, and my eyes fell asleep wind sand. Sand and wind - that my words, do not we live, we live creates time."

"Sexuality is animal; it is a natural function, whereas eroticism develops within society. The former belongs to the realm of biology, the latter to that of culture. Its essence is the imaginary: eroticism is a metaphor of sexuality. There is a dividing line between eroticism and sexuality?the word like. Eroticism is a representation, a ceremony of transfiguration: men and women make love like lions, eagles, doves, or praying mantises; neither lions nor praying mantises make love like human beings. We humans see ourselves in animals; animals do not see themselves in humans. By contemplating itself, humanity changes itself and changes sexuality. Eroticism is not brute sex but sex transfigured by the imagination."

"Revolt is the violence of an entire people; rebellion the unruliness of an individual or an uprising by a minority; both are spontaneous and blind. Revolution is both planned and spontaneous, a science and an art."

"Social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings."

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

"Surrealism has been the drunken flame that guides the steps of the sleepwalker who tiptoes along the edge of the shadow that the blade of the guillotine casts on the neck of the condemned."

"Some nights her skin was covered with phosphorescence and hug was a piece of night tattooed with fire."

"The American: a titan enamored of progress, a fanatical giant who worships "getting things done" but never asks himself what he is doing nor why he is doing it."

"Surrealism is not a school of poetry but a movement of liberation.... A way of rediscovering the language of innocence, a renewal of the primordial pact, poetry is the basic text, the foundation of the human order. Surrealism is revolutionary because it is a return to the beginning of all beginnings."

"Tell me how you die and I'll tell you who you are."

"The art of the great historic civilizations never impress us as much as an Eskimo harpoon or a mask from the South Pacific. The contact is physical, and the feeling we experience is very much like acute anxiety. Inner or outer space, the world below or beyond, becomes a great weight pressing down upon us. Each work is a solid block of time, time standing still, time more massive than a mountain, despite the fact that it is as intangible as air or thought. The handiwork of primitive peoples reveals the time before time."

"That I thought the world was a vast system of signs, a Conversation Between giant beings. My actions, the cricket's saw, the star's blink, were nothing but pauses and syllables, scattered phrases from That dialogue. What word could it be, of which I was only a syllable? Who speaks the word? To whom is it spoken?"

"The decline of European Catholicism match your Hispanic swing: extending new lands at the time you stopped being creative. It offers a philosophy and a petrified faith made ??so that the originality of the new believers do not find occasion to manifest. Your membership is passive. The fervor and depth of Mexican religiosity contrasts with the relative poverty of their creations. We have no great religious poetry, as we have no original philosophy, not a single reformer or mystic significance... Catholicism offers a refuge for the descendants of those who had seen the destruction of their temples and manuscripts and the suppression of the higher forms of culture but of reason itself of its European decadence, denied any opportunity to express their singularity."

"The eyes are closed, the opening words."

"The eternal presence of the gods"

"The first deaths will barely swell the daily count, and no one in the statistics bureau will notice that extra zero. But after a while everyone will begin to look at each other and ask: what's happening? Because for months doors and windows are going to rattle, furniture and trees will creak."

"The image that Mexico offers the late nineteenth century is that of discord. A deeper political discord complaint or civil war, because it consisted of overlapping legal and cultural forms that not only expressing our reality, but the choking and immobilized... Cut ties with the past, impossible to dialogue with the United States-we only spoke the language of force or business-useless relations with the peoples of Spanish language, locked in dead forms. We were reduced to a unilateral imitation of France, which always ignored us. What was it? Choking and loneliness."

"The North American system only wants to consider the positive aspects of reality. Men and women are subjected from childhood to an inexorable process of adaptation; certain principles, contained in brief formulas are endlessly repeated by the Press, the radio, the churches, and the schools, and by those kindly, sinister beings, the North American mothers and wives. A person imprisoned by these schemes is like a plant in a flowerpot too small for it: he cannot grow or mature."

"The most dangerous human masses are those in whose veins have been injected the poison of fear .... fear of change."

"The old days will never disappear completely and all wounds, even the oldest, blood still do well."

"The poet does not choose his words. When we say that a poet seeks his language, not to say that I walk by libraries or collecting antique markets and new twists, but undecided, hesitating between words that really belong to you, you are in it from the beginning, and the other learned in books or on the street. When a poet finds his word, acknowledges, and he was on it. And he was already in it. The words of the poet is confused with his being. He is his word. At the time of creation, emerges into consciousness the most secret part of ourselves. The building consists of an inseparable bring out certain words of our being."

"The poetic experience, like the religious one, is a mortal leap: a change of nature that is also a return to our original nature. Hidden by the profane or prosaic life, our being suddenly remembers its lost identity; and then that other that we are appears, emerges. Poetry and religion are a revelation. But the poetic word dispenses with divine authority. The image is sustained by itself, without the need to appeal to rational demonstration or to the protection of a supernatural power: it is the revelation of himself that man makes to himself. The religious word, on the contrary, aims to reveal a mystery that is, by definition, alien to us."