Top 100 Maria Montessori Quotes
#1. Discipline must come through liberty ... We do not consider an individual disciplined only when he has been rendered as artificially silent as a mute and as immovable as a paralytic. He is an individual annihilated, not disciplined.
Maria Montessori
#2. The child is endowed with unknown powers, which can guide us to a radiant future. If what we really want is a new world, then education must take as its aim the development of these hidden possibilities.
Maria Montessori
#3. It is in the encounter of the maternal guiding instincts with the sensitive periods of the newly born that conscious love develops between parent and child.
Maria Montessori
#4. Only practical work and experience lead the young to maturity.
Maria Montessori
#5. How often is the soul of man - especially in childhood - deprived because he is not allowed to come in contact with nature.
Maria Montessori
#6. The role of education is to interest the child profoundly in an external activity to which he will give all his potential
Maria Montessori
#7. All work is noble; the only ignoble thing is to live without working. There is need to realize the value of work in all its forms whether manual or intellectual, to be called 'mate,' to have sympathetic understanding of all forms of activity.
Maria Montessori
#8. The child seeks for independence by means of work; an independence of body and mind.
Maria Montessori
#9. Now, what really makes a teacher is love for the human child; for it is love that transforms the social duty of the educator into the higher consciousness of a mission.
Maria Montessori
#10. We do not believe in the educative power of words and commands alone, but seek cautiously, and almost without the child's knowing it, to guide his natural activity.
Maria Montessori
#11. The world of education is like an island where people cut off from the world are prepared for life by exclusion from it.
Maria Montessori
#12. Every great cause is born from repeated failures and from imperfect achievements.
Maria Montessori
#13. The land is where our roots are. The children must be taught to feel and live in harmony with the Earth.
Maria Montessori
#14. Do not tell them how to do it. Show them how to do it and do not say a word. If you tell them, they will watch your lips move. If you show them, they will want to do it themselves.
Maria Montessori
#15. The greatest sign of success for a teacher is to be able to say, The children are now working as if I did not exist.
Maria Montessori
#16. The needs of mankind are universal. Our means of meeting them create the richness and diversity of the planet. The Montessori child should come to relish the texture of that diversity.
Maria Montessori
#17. The exercises of practical life are formative activities, a work of adaptation to the environment. Such adaptation to the environment and efficient functioning therein is the very essence of a useful education.
Maria Montessori
#18. No one who has ever done anything really great or successful has ever done it simply because he was attracted by what we call a 'reward' or by the fear of what we call a 'punishment.'
Maria Montessori
#19. If a child finds no stimuli for the activities which would contribute to his development, he is attracted simply to 'things' and desires to posses them.
Maria Montessori
#20. It is easy to substitute our will for that of the child by means of suggestion or coercion; but when we have done this we have robbed him of his greatest right, the right to construct his own personality.
Maria Montessori
#21. If education is protection to life, you will realize that it is necessary that education accompany life during its whole course.
Maria Montessori
#22. Travel stories teach geography; insect stories lead the child into natural science; and so on. The teacher, in short, can use reading to introduce her pupils to the most varied subjects; and the moment they have been thus started, they can go on to any limit guided by the single passion for reading.
Maria Montessori
#23. To assist a child we must provide him with an environment which will enable him to develop freely.
Maria Montessori
#24. The most important period of life is not the age of university studies, but the first one, the period from birth to the age of six.
Maria Montessori
#25. Education demands, then, only this: the utilization of the inner powers of the child for his own instruction.
Maria Montessori
#26. The environment must be rich in motives which lend interest to activity and invite the child to conduct his own experiences.
Maria Montessori
#27. 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.
Maria Montessori
#28. At about a year and a half, the child discovers another fact, and that is that each thing has its own name.
Maria Montessori
#29. Adults have not understood children or adolescents and they are, as a consequence, in continual conflict with them.
Maria Montessori
#30. All our handling of the child will bear fruit, not only at the moment, but in the adult they are destined to become.
Maria Montessori
#31. We all know the sense of comfort of which we are conscious when a good half of the floor space in a room is unencumbered; this seems to offer us the agreeable possibility of moving about freely.
Maria Montessori
#32. Such prizes and punishments are, if I may be allowed the expression, the bench of the soul, the instrument of slavery for the spirit.
Maria Montessori
#33. The more perfect the approximation to truth, the more perfect is art.
Maria Montessori
#34. 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.
Maria Montessori
#35. If the ways of the Almighty are not humanly logical, it is not the fault of the Almighty but of the limitations of human logic.
Maria Montessori
#36. He does it with his hands, by experience, first in play and then through work. The hands are the instruments of man's intelligence.
Maria Montessori
#37. My system is to be considered a system leading up, in a general way, to education. It can be followed not only in the education of little children from three to six years of age, but can be extended to children up to ten years of age.
Maria Montessori
#38. The child, in fact, once he feels sure of himself, will no longer seek the approval of authority after every step.
Maria Montessori
#39. The person who is developing freely and naturally arrives at a spiritual equilibrium in which he is master of his actions, just as one who has acquired physical poise can move freely.
Maria Montessori
#40. It is fortunate, I think, that nature is not bounded by human reason and by laboratory work and experimentation, for by the laws of pure reason and by microscopic investigation, it might easily have been proved, long before this, that children could not be born.
Maria Montessori
#41. Order is not goodness; but perhaps it is the indispensable road to arrive at it.
Maria Montessori
#43. The respect and protection of woman and of maternity should be raised to the position of an inalienable social duty and should become one of the principles of human morality.
Maria Montessori
#44. If help and salvation are to come, they can only come from the children, for the children are the makers of men.
Maria Montessori
#46. Children are not only sensitive to silence, but also to a voice which calls them ... Out of that silence.
Maria Montessori
#47. Early childhood education is the key to the betterment of society.
Maria Montessori
#48. It is the child who makes the man, and no man exists who was not made by the child he once was.
Maria Montessori
#49. The child, making use of all that he finds around him, shapes himself for the future.
Maria Montessori
#50. Do not erase the designs the child makes in the soft wax of his inner life.
Maria Montessori
#51. We must therefore turn to the child as to the key to the fate of our future life.
Maria Montessori
#52. Today, however, those things which occupy us in the field of education are the interests of humanity at large and of civilization, and before such great forces we can recognize only one country-the entire world.
Maria Montessori
#53. By the age of three, the child has already laid down the foundations of his personality as a human being, and only then does he need the help of special scholastic influences. So great are the conquests he has made that one may well say: the child who goes to school at three is already a little man.
Maria Montessori
#54. We await the successsive births in the soul of the child. We give all possible material, that nothing may lack to the groping soul, and then we watch for the perfect faculty to come, safeguarding the child from interruption so that it may carry its efforts through.
Maria Montessori
#55. Independence is not a static condition; it is a continuous conquest, and in order to reach not only freedom, but also strength, and the perfecting on one's powers, it is necessary to follow this path of unremitting toil.
Maria Montessori
#57. The child is the spiritual builder of mankind, and obstacles to his free development are the stones in the wall by which the soul of man has become imprisoned.
Maria Montessori
#59. Joy, feeling one's own value, being appreciated and loved by others, feeling useful and capable of production are all factors of enormous value for the human soul.
Maria Montessori
#60. Free choice is one of the highest of all the mental processes.
Maria Montessori
#61. Sometimes very small children in a proper environment develop a skill and exactness in their work that can only surprise us.
Maria Montessori
#62. If we really want children to grow into independent and resourceful adults, we should stop pouring their milk as soon as they have learned to pour it themselves and stop fastening their buttons as soon as they can fasten them without help.
Maria Montessori
#63. Do not offer the child the content of the mind, but the order for that content.
Maria Montessori
#64. Woman was always the custodian of human sentiment, morality and honour, and in these respects, man always has yielded woman the palm.
Maria Montessori
#65. The activity of the child has always been looked upon as an expression of his vitality.
Maria Montessori
#66. The only language men ever speak perfectly is the one they learn in babyhood, when no one can teach them anything!
Maria Montessori
#67. If the whole of mankind is to be united into one brotherhood, all obstacles must be removed so that men, all over the surface of the globe, should be as children playing in a garden.
Maria Montessori
#68. It is exactly in the repetition of the exercises that the education of the senses exists; not that the child shall know colors, forms or qualities, but that he refine his senses through an exercise of attention, comparison and judgment.
Maria Montessori
#69. 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.
Maria Montessori
#70. It follows that at the beginning of his life the individual can accomplish wonders without effort and quite unconsciously.
Maria Montessori
#72. We teachers can only help the work going on, as servants wait upon a master.
Maria Montessori
#73. Plainly, the environment must be a living one, directed by a higher intelligence, arranged by an adult who is prepared for his mission.
Maria Montessori
#74. The education of even a small child, therefore, does not aim at preparing him for school, but for life.
Maria Montessori
#75. Whoever touches the life of the child touches the most sensitive point of a whole which has roots in the most distant past and climbs toward the infinite future.
Maria Montessori
#76. One of the great problems facing men is their failure to realize the fact that a child possesses an active psychic life even when he cannot manifest it, and that the child must secretly perfect this inner life over a long period of time.
Maria Montessori
#77. Giving children the opportunity to stir up life and leave it free to discover.
Maria Montessori
#78. If the child shows through its conversation that the educational work of the school is being undermined by the attitude taken in his home, he will be sent back to his parents, to teach them thus how to take advantage of their good opportunities.
Maria Montessori
#79. If education recognizes the intrinsic value of the child's personality and provides an environment suited to spiritual growth, we have the revelation of an entirely new child whose astonishing characteristics can eventually contribute to the betterment of the world.
Maria Montessori
#80. The essential thing is to arouse such an interest that it engages the child's whole personality.
Maria Montessori
#82. Education should therefore include the two forms of work, manual and intellectual, for the same person, and thus make it understood by practical experience that these two kinds complete each other and are equally essential to a civilized existence.
Maria Montessori
#83. Needless help is an actual hindrance to the development of natural forces.
Maria Montessori
#84. Our care of the child should be governed, not by the desire to make him learn things, but by the endeavor always to keep burning within him that light which is called intelligence.
Maria Montessori
#85. I have for many years interested myself in the study of children from three years upwards. Many have urged me to continue my studies on the same lines with older children. But what I have felt to be most vital is the need for more careful and particularized study of the tiny child.
Maria Montessori
#86. To teach details is to bring confusion; to establish the relationship between things is to bring knowledge.
Maria Montessori
#87. What advice can we give to new mothers? Their children need to work at an interesting occupation: they should not be helped unnecessarily, nor interrupted, once they have begun to do something intelligent.
Maria Montessori
#88. A child starts from nothing and advances alone. It is the child's reason about which the sensitive periods revolve. The reason provides the initial force and energy, and a child absorbs his first images to assist the reason and act on it.
Maria Montessori
#89. 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.
Maria Montessori
#90. Conventions which camouflage a man's true feelings are a spiritual lie which help him adapt himself to the organized deviations of society ...
Maria Montessori
#91. As soon as children find something that interests them they lose their instability and learn to concentrate.
Maria Montessori
#92. An educational method that shall have liberty as its basis must intervene to help the child to a conquest of liberty. That is to say, his training must be such as shall help him to diminish as much as possible the social bonds which limit his activity.
Maria Montessori
#93. Movement, or physical activity, is thus an essential factor in intellectual growth, which depends upon the impressions received from outside. Through movement we come in contact with external reality, and it is through these contacts that we eventually acquire even abstract ideas.
Maria Montessori
#95. Growth comes from activity, not from intellectual understanding.
Maria Montessori
#96. Watching a child makes it obvious that the development of his mind comes through his movements.
Maria Montessori
#97. Only when the child is able to identify its own center with the center of the universe does education really begin.
Maria Montessori
#98. Bring the child to the consciousness of his own dignity and he will feel free.
Maria Montessori
#99. The ancient superficial idea of the uniform and progressive growth of the human personality has remained unaltered, and the erroneous belief has persisted that it is the duty of the adult to fashion the child according to the pattern required by society.
Maria Montessori
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
