psychoanalyst, educator, theologian and writer, Rubem Azevedo Alves is considered, together with Paulo Freire, one of the main Brazilian educators. He left a vast contribution to national culture, with 146 works written and published in Brazil and other countries. To learn more about topics related to education and literature, check out the selection of Rubem Alves’s best quotes.
Quotes by Rubem Alves to think about Pedagogy and Literature
Everyone wants to learn to speak, but nobody wants to learn to listen.
What is written in the heart does not need agendas because we do not forget. What the memory loves becomes eternal.
The eyes are the body lamps. When the eye light is colorful, the world becomes a rainbow.
To educate is not to teach the answers. To educate is to teach to think.
A single moment of beauty and love justifies the whole life.
My time has become scarce to discuss labels. I want the essence. My soul is in a hurry.
longing is our soul saying where she wants to go back.
Educators, before being experts in knowledge tools, should be experts in love: dream interpreters.
To love is having a bird landed on your finger. Anyone who has a finger -picked bird knows that at any time he can fly.
Life cannot be saved for tomorrow. It always happens in the present.
We love not the person who speaks beautiful. But the person who listens beautiful.
There will be no butterflies if life does not go through long and silent metamorphoses.
We are the things that live within us.
Every soul is a song that is played.
It is not enough to have heard to hear what is said. It is also necessary that there is silence within the soul.
Hope is a hallucinogenic drug.
Time is measured with beats. It can be measured with a clock beats or can be measured with heartbeat.
God is this: the beauty that is heard in silence. Hence the importance of knowing how to listen to others: beauty lives there too.
To read is to make love with the words.
Simplicity is that: when the heart seeks one thing. Concert for body and soul.
We don’t see what we see. We see what we are.
Who experiences beauty is in communion with the sacred.
Without the education of sensitivities, all skills are foolish and meaningless.
There are schools that are cages and there are schools that are wings.
We have two ears. With one, we hear the noise of time, passengers, which disappear. With the other we hear the music of the eternal soul, which remains.
Passion is content only with the eternal.
You have to leave for longing to arrive and I want to return.
It is useless to travel elsewhere if we could not disembark from ourselves.
Maybe I didn’t get to where I planned to go. But I arrived, unintentionally, where my heart wanted to go, without me knowing it.
Your sadness does not come from loneliness. Comes from the fantasies that arise in solitude.
God gave us wings of thought to fly, men gave us the cages of religion.
Happy oyster does not pearls. This goes for oysters and goes for us humans.
Optimism is when we smile to the future “because of”; Hope is when we smile to the future “despite”
New loves do not match the dignity of the old.
It’s been a long time that to think about God, I don’t read the theologians, I read the poets.
What does a people do are the thoughts of those who make it up.
Beauty does not eliminate the tragedy, but makes it bearable.
While happy society is not enough, there are at least fragments of the future in which joy is served as a sacrament, so that children learn that the world can be different.
My soul is a room where the strangest objects are placed, next to each other, without order, with no intention of making sense.
The birth of thought is the same as the birth of a child: it all starts with an act of love.
There are many perfect people who see nothing… The act of seeing is not a natural thing. You need to be learned!
Love lives in this subtle thread of conversation, swinging between the mouth and the ear.
What I do is try to paint my fantasies with words in the face of the astonishment that is life.
All longing is a kind of old age. This is why the eyes of the old people are filled with absences.
jealousy is that pain that gives when we realize that the loved one can be happy without us.
There is no love that survives only feelings, without the soft conversation.
I had a great desire to embrace you, but I was ashamed. I felt “compassion”. “Compassion” means “feeling with”. I felt what you felt.
Love is life happening at the moment: without past, no future, pure gift, eternity in a soap bubble.
For being a master is this: teaching happiness.
Prayers and poems are the same thing: words we pronounce from silence, asking silence to speak to us.
Did you like the beautiful words of Rubem Alves? To continue to be inspired by the great Brazilian educators, take a look at these quotes from Paulo Freire!