40 phrases by Monteiro Lobato for those who admire his legacy

There is only one remedy for darkness, light.

Just as it is early to twist the cucumber, it is also working with the child that a good crop of adults is obtained.

Because I have been everything, and I believe that my true calling is to look for what is worth being.

Everything comes from dreams. First we dream, then we do.

There are two ways to write. One is to write with the idea of not displeasing or shocking anyone. Another way is to boldly say what you think, no matter what, jail, gallows, exile.

I still end up making books where our children can live.

The children saved me. From writing to them so much, I simplified myself.

Grammarians do not own the language, and this is not a logical creation.

Reading should not be seen as a pile of information, but as an attitude that exercises thinking and provides knowledge autonomy.

A country is made with men and books.

I’m already sick of writing for big guys. Unfunny animals. But for children, a book is a whole world.

Talent does not ask for passage, it imposes itself on the world.

To want to have good friends, you need to know if you have one.

Progress friend, you are comfortable, you are delicious, but ugly.

Writing is recording psychic reactions. The writer works like an antenna – and from that comes the value of literature. Through it, aspects of a people’s soul are fixed, or at least moments of that people’s life.

After finishing reading, the reader runs to the window to see if there is still sky in the world and air.

If Chico Xavier produced all that on his own, then he deserves to occupy as many chairs as he wants at the Academia Brasileira de Letras.

It is wrong to think that it is science that kills a religion. Only another religion can with it.

Whoever writes a book creates a castle, whoever reads it lives in it.

No imitating anyone. We have to be ourselves. Being a comet nucleus, not a tail. Pull in line, don’t follow.

In Brazil it is subtracted; add up, nobody adds up.

Only those being asphyxiated learn that air exists.

Nature knows what it does. Put the big fruits on the ground and the small ones on trees.

Who barely reads, barely hears, barely speaks, barely sees.

It was through the streets of life that I walked barefoot and skinned my feet of vain love.

I adore Emilia, and when I write books on this machine, I’m the first one who laughs at the little things she says.

Whoever is born in the middle step, only acquires experience from there and will never be a complete one.

The thing that scares me the least is the future.

Everything is madness or dream in the beginning. Nothing that man has done in the world has begun otherwise—but so many dreams have already come true that we have no right to doubt any of them.

Collars, my grandchildren. The evil of the world is simply this: collars!

A government must come out of the people like smoke from a bonfire.

I find the human creature much more interesting in childhood than after idiotically becoming an adult.

What I appreciate most about a style is the exact property of each word.

Never in the world has a bullet killed an idea.

Man is a disease of Nature – and the worst of all because he is an intelligent disease. It insists on superimposing its will on nature and it is, more and more, a regrettable conflict of two contrary evolutions, the natural and the human.

Whoever dies for his country lives forever.

Be yourself, because either we are ourselves or we are nothing.

The conscience of the common man lives in his pocket, that’s all.

Nature created the endless carpet that covers the surface of the earth. Inside the fur of this rug live all the animals, respectfully. None spoils it, none gnaws it, except man.