Maria Montessori Quotes

The ancient saying, "There is nothing in the intellect which was not first in some way in the senses," and senses being explorers of the world, opens the way to knowledge.

Education must start from birth.

It is not in human nature for all men to tread the same path of development, as animals do of a single species.

Happiness is not the whole aim of education. A man must be independent in his powers and character; able to work and assert his mastery over all that depends on him.

The child becomes a person through work.

The teacher's task is not to talk, but to prepare and arrange a series of motives for cultural activity in a special environment made for the child.

The child has other powers than ours, and the creation he achieves is no small one; it is everything.

We teachers can only help the work going on, as servants wait upon a master.

The greatest source of discouragement is the conviction that one is unable to do something

The concept of an education centered upon the care of the living being alters all previous ideas. Resting no longer on a curriculum, or a timetable, education must conform to the facts of human life.

There are many things which no teacher can convey to a child of three, but a child of five can do it with ease.

To aid life, leaving it free, however, that is the basic task of the educator.

How often is the soul of man - especially in childhood - deprived because he is not allowed to come in contact with nature.

At about a year and a half, the child discovers another fact, and that is that each thing has its own name.

Order is not goodness; but perhaps it is the indispensable road to arrive at it.

Education demands, then, only this: the utilization of the inner powers of the child for his own instruction.

Mental development must be connected with movement and be dependent on it. It is vital that educational theory and practice should be informed by that idea.

It is well to cultivate a friendly feeling towards error, to treat it as a companion inseparable from our lives, as something having a purpose, which it truly has.

The work of education is divided between the teacher and the environment.

There can be no substitute for work, neither affection nor physical well-being can replace it.

The child’s parents are not his makers but his guardians.

The principal agent is the object itself and not the instruction given by the teacher. It is the child who uses the objects; it is the child who is active, and not the teacher.

Discipline must come through liberty.

The fundamental basis of education must always remain that one must act for oneself. That is clear. One must act for him or herself.

Children are not only sensitive to silence, but also to a voice which calls them ... Out of that silence.

Bring the child to the consciousness of his own dignity and he will feel free.

The prize and punishments are incentives toward unnatural or forced effort, and, therefore we certainly cannot speak of the natural development of the child in connection with them.

The greatness of the human personality begins at the hour of birth.

Great tact and delicacy is necessary for the care of the mind of a child from three to six years, and an adult can have very little of it.

This then is the first duty of an educator: to stir up life but leave it free to develop.

But an adult if he is to provide proper guidance, must always be calm and act slowly so that the child who is watching him can clearly see his actions in all their particulars.

It follows that at the beginning of his life the individual can accomplish wonders without effort and quite unconsciously.

A vital force is active in every individual and leads it towards its own evolution.

We must therefore turn to the child as to the key to the fate of our future life.

The child is much more spiritually elevated than is usually supposed. He often suffers, not from too much work, but from work that is unworthy of him.

No one can be free unless he is independent... In reality, he who is served is limited in his independence.

Education, as conceived today, is something separated both from biological and social life.

A new education from birth onwards must be built up. Education must be reconstructed and based on the law of nature and not on the preconceived notions and prejudices of adult society.

If I am going up a ladder, and a dog begins to bite at my ankles, I can do one of two things - either turn round and kick out at the it, or simply go on up the ladder. I prefer to go up the ladder!

Order is ... the true key to rapidity of reaction.

Culture and education have no bounds or limits; now man is in a phase in which he must decide for himself how far he can proceed in the culture that belongs to the whole of humanity.

The greatness of the human personality begins at the hour of birth. From this almost mystic affirmation there comes what may seem a strange conclusion: that education must start from birth.

in nature everything is transformed but nothing destroyed.

The hand is the prehensile organ of the mind.

We seek to sow life in the child rather than theories, to help him in his growth, mental and emotional as well as physical, and for that we must offer grand and lofty ideas to the human mind.

Since it is through movement that the will realises itself, we should assist a child in his attempts to put his will into act.

The child endures all things.

The task of the educator lies in seeing that the child does not confound good with immobility and evil with activity.

Except when he has regressive tendencies, the child's nature is to aim directly and energetically at functional independence.

The child is essentially alien to this society of men and might express his position in the words of the Gospel: My kingdom is not of this world