| "To travel, for me, was never tourism. I never took
photos of an exotic place. A journey is an extension of a human horizon."
(...) "Journeys, folklore and languages are something constant in my life. I
have bought Hebraic books and records. I have studied Hindu, Sanskrit. The
desire to read Göethe in the original obliged me to study German. I don’t
study languages in order to speak, but to better penetrate the soul of
peoples." Interview with Pedro Bloch, Manchete magazine - April/1964 |
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"My childhood as an only child gave me two things that
seem negative, and yet were always positive for me: Silence and Solitude.
These were always part of my life. A magic space where kaleidoscopes
invented fabulous geometric worlds, where clocks revealed the secret of
their mechanism and dolls the game of what they would see (...). Later, it
was this space that books opened up onto, allowing
one to go into their realities and their dreams (...). It was, moreover,
this space that my own books one day opened onto, which is no more than the
natural unfolding of a life blessed with such things, and immersed in
solitude and silence as much as it could be." MEIRELES, Cecília: Obra Poética, Rio de Janeiro, Nova Aguillar |
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| "(...) My manner of keeping my
distance is due to the fact that I think each
human being is sacred, do you understand?
It is this fear of invading, this timidity toward closeness. I am a creature
removed (...)." Interview with Pedro Bloch, Manchete magazine - April/1964 |
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| "Education, for me, is to place
inside of the individual, inside a skeleton of bones that is already there,
a structure of feelings, an emotional skeleton. The understanding should be
in the foundation of love." Interview with Pedro Bloch, Manchete magazine - April/1964 |
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| "(...) in approaching these new fields we feel that,
with New Education, life may truly expand itself and each person freely
shape him or herself, so that, in the miracle of subsequent undertakings,
each value would be in its proper place and no potentiality wasted." (p.7) MEIRELES, Cecília. O Espírito Victorioso. Typographia do Annuario do Brasil, s.d. |
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| "Maybe the importance
of the modern school
doesn’t reside so much in its intentions (...): What is curious, what it is
that we’re actually interested in, because of what it reveals about this
moment in our evolution, is the generalization taken up by these ideas,
(...) its simultaneous appearance at various points of the planet, creating
a belief in a general leveling of development between people of the most
diverse origins and traditions. At this moment, we see a vast amount of
thinking pass to the popular domain that thus
far shows limited properties of dreamers and thinkers. We attend to
this phenomenon with admiration: and with still more admiration we see not
only these ideas transform themselves in this way, passing from one
environment into another, from a small individual world to a large
collective world, but also these ideas not remaining simple ideas, acquiring
form, body, activity, so that we experience them as undeniable evidence that
there is a positive form for all human aspirations, and that dreams are
nothing more than an anticipation of future realities." (p.8) MEIRELES, Cecília. O Espírito Victorioso. Typographia do Annuario do Brasil, s.d. |
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| "What the modern school
intends, above all, is to restore to human creatures their primitive
qualities of free spirit, of straight-forward intelligence, (…)" (p. 14) MEIRELES, Cecília. O Espírito Victorioso. Typographia do Annuario do Brasil, s.d. |
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"My nanny, black, obscure Pedrina (...) was the
magical companion of my childhood. She knew a lot about Brazilian folklore and
didn’t just tell stories but dramatized them, singing, dancing, and she knew
fortune telling, nursery rhymes, myths etc. (...). On the other hand, my
grandmother, with whom I stayed after losing my mother, knew lots of things
of Azorian folklore and was very mystical, as are all those of S. Miguel’s
Island." MEIRELES, Cecília: Poetry, Rio de Janeiro, Nova Aguillar |
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| "But when I speak of these small and certain
moments of happiness
that are outside every window, some say these things don’t exist, others
that they only exist outside my windows, and others, finally, that it is
necessary to learn to look, to see them like this." Interview with Pedro Bloch, Manchete magazine - April/1964 |
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| "Through languages and folklore I see
how much we are all children of God. The passage from the magic world to the
logical world enchants me." Interview with Pedro Bloch, Manchete magazine - April/1964 |
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| "(...) the school teacher is currently the most important factor in
the preparation for future society. The
teacher appears to us today no longer with his old appearance
as the transmitter of immovable knowledge, but as an artist and as a man,
liberally creating with all that is brilliant in his intelligence, pure in
his feeling and noble in his action (because he will feel the "primordial
element of life"; will "act upon fundamental principles" as he "touches upon
the very essence of creation")." (p.18)
MEIRELES, Cecília. O Espírito Victorioso. Typographia do Annuario do Brasil, s.d.
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"The educator is not
the bureaucrat who goes to the school as to a government office, limiting
his working activity to a half-dozen hours a day and respecting the prestige
of the authorities: he is the constructor of liberty and of harmonious progress who, living in the present, is always
investigating the future, because it is in this future, peopled by promises
of a better life, that its students’ destiny should be fully realized." Diário de Notícias, 1st August, 1930, Página de Educação, p.5 |
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| "The
practice of a school may be to instruct: but its purpose should be to
educate." (p. 19) (...) "Everything is held in this succession:
instruct to educate, educate to live,
and live for what? (Man’s only reality is spiritual reality.)" (p. 21) MEIRELES, Cecília. O Espírito Victorioso. Typographia do Annuario do Brasil, s.d. |
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| "I studied singing and
the violin. I abandoned them. This was necessary in order to acquire the
life and poetry
that can blossom even on a tram journey. Even in meetings, in which lots of
people would be in discussion, I was able to absent myself in order to be in
my world and to construct. Gradually I could create my Nanja Island, São
Miguel transfigured by dream. I find human continuity through poetry
beautiful." MEIRELES, Cecília: Poetry, Rio de Janeiro, Nova Aguillar |
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| "Nanny Pedrina used to tell me the story of the Palace
of Red Porcelain. I thought that it should be very refreshing to live in
such a palace and, as a girl, was at once ready to transform an immense jug
at the house into a palace, and someone, wanting to hide it from my
dreams, trying so much to find a place to hide it, broke it
into a thousand pieces." Interview with Pedro Bloch, Manchete magazine - April/1964 |
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