Top 100 Montessori Maria Quotes
#1. 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!
Maria Montessori
#2. Love and the hope of it are not things one can learn; they are a part of life's heritage.
Maria Montessori
#3. The child builds his inmost self out of the deeply held impressions he receives.
Maria Montessori
#4. 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
#5. Personal health is related to self-control and to the worship of life in all its natural beauty - self-control bringing with it happiness, renewed youth, and long life.
Maria Montessori
#7. Books are mute as far as sound is concerned. It follows that reading aloud is a combination of two distinct operations, of two 'languages.' It is something far more complex than speaking and reading taken separately by themselves.
Maria Montessori
#8. 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
#9. The child is an enigma ... He has the highest potentialities, but we do not know what he will be.
Maria Montessori
#10. The child can only develop fully by means of experience in his environment. We call such experience 'work'.
Maria Montessori
#11. It is almost possible to say that there is a mathematical relationship between the beauty of his surroundings and the activity of the child; he will make discoveries rather more voluntarily in a gracious setting than in an ugly one.
Maria Montessori
#12. 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
#13. It is not true that I invented what is called the Montessori Method ... I have studied the child; I have taken what the child has given me and expressed it, and that is what is called the Montessori Method.
Maria Montessori
#14. 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
#15. 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.
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. There is no description, no image in any book that is capable of replacing the sight of real trees, and all of the life to be found around them in a real forest.
Maria Montessori
#18. The greatest triumph of our educational method should always be this: to bring about the spontaneous progress of the child.
Maria Montessori
#20. The observation of the way in which the children pass from the first disordered movements to those which are spontaneous and ordered
this is the book of the teacher; this is the book which must inspire her actions ...
Maria Montessori
#21. The development of the child during the first three years after birth is unequaled in intensity and importance by any period that precedes or follows in the whole life of the child.
Maria Montessori
#22. The fundamental basis of education must always remain that one must act for oneself. That is clear. One must act for him or herself.
Maria Montessori
#23. The maternal duty of suckling her own children, prescribed to mothers by hygienists, is based on a physiological principle: the mother's milk nourishes an infant more perfectly than any other.
Maria Montessori
#24. Imagination does not become great until human beings, given the courage and the strength, use it to create.
Maria Montessori
#25. 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
#26. The things he sees are not just remembered; they form a part of his soul.
Maria Montessori
#27. 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
#28. A child's work is to create the person she/he will become.
Maria Montessori
#29. If we try to think back to the dim and distant past ... what is it that helps us reconstruct those times, and to picture the lives of those who lived in them? It is their art ... It is thanks to the hand, the companion of the mind, that civilization has arisen.
Maria Montessori
#30. Adults have not understood children or adolescents and they are, as a consequence, in continual conflict with them.
Maria Montessori
#31. Watch the unending activity of the flowing stream or the growing tree. See the breakers of the ocean, the unceasing movements of the earth, the planets, the sun and the stars. All creation is life, movement, work.
Maria Montessori
#32. 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
Maria Montessori
#33. In the psychological realm of relationship between teacher and child, the teacher's part and its techniques are analogous to those of the valet; they are to serve, and to serve well: to serve the spirit.
Maria Montessori
#34. We recommend for the training of teachers not only a considerable artistic education in general but special attention to the art of reading.
Maria Montessori
#35. A child is a discoverer. He is an amorphous, splendid being in search of his own proper form.
Maria Montessori
#36. The man of character is the persistent man, the man who is faithful to his own word, his own convictions, his own affections.
Maria Montessori
#37. The instructions of the teacher consist then merely in a hint, a touch-enough to give a start to the child. The rest develops of itself.
Maria Montessori
#38. At about a year and a half, the child discovers another fact, and that is that each thing has its own name.
Maria Montessori
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. The environment must be rich in motives which lend interest to activity and invite the child to conduct his own experiences.
Maria Montessori
#42. Education demands, then, only this: the utilization of the inner powers of the child for his own instruction.
Maria Montessori
#43. The purpose of life is to obey the hidden command which ensures harmony among all and creates an ever better world. We are not created only to enjoy the world, we are created in order to evolve the cosmos.
Maria Montessori
#44. 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
#45. Our goal is not so much the imparting of knowledge as the unveiling and developing of spiritual energy.
Maria Montessori
#46. To assist a child we must provide him with an environment which will enable him to develop freely.
Maria Montessori
#47. 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
#48. There are many things which no teacher can convey to a child of three, but a child of five can do it with ease.
Maria Montessori
#49. If education is protection to life, you will realize that it is necessary that education accompany life during its whole course.
Maria Montessori
#50. Children display a universal love of mathematics, which is
par excellence the science of precision, order, and intelligence.
Maria Montessori
#51. 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
#52. When you have solved the problem of controlling the attention of the child, you have solved the entire problem of its education.
Maria Montessori
#53. The child is truly a miraculous being, and this should be felt deeply by the educator.
Maria Montessori
#55. To consider the school as a place where instruction is given is one point of view. But, to consider the school as a preparation for life is another. In the latter case, the school must satisfy all the needs of life.
Maria Montessori
#56. How often is the soul of man - especially in childhood - deprived because he is not allowed to come in contact with nature.
Maria Montessori
#57. It is by developing the individual that he is prepared for that wonderful manifestation of the human intelligence, which drawing constitutes. The ability to see reality in form, in color, in proportion, to be master of the movements of one's own hand - that is what is necessary.
Maria Montessori
#58. At a given moment a child becomes interested in a piece of work, showing it by the expression of his face, by his intense attention, by his perseverance in the same exercise. That child has set foot upon the road leading to discipline.
Maria Montessori
#59. Environment is undoubtedly a secondary factor in the phenomena of life; it can modify in that it can help or hinder, but it can never create.
Maria Montessori
#60. How can any one paint who cannot grade colors? How can any one write poetry who has not learnt to hear and see?
Maria Montessori
#61. Deceit is a kind of garment that conceals the soul. It might even be compared to a whole wardrobe, so many are its guises.
Maria Montessori
#62. We must help the child to act for himself, will for himself, think for himself; this is the art of those who aspire to serve the spirit.
Maria Montessori
#63. Only practical work and experience lead the young to maturity.
Maria Montessori
#64. The child's conquests of independence are the basic steps in what is called his 'natural development'.
Maria Montessori
#65. 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
#66. The possibility of observing the developments of the psychical life of the child as natural phenomena and experimental reactions transforms the school itself in action into a kind of scientific laboratory for the psychogenetic study of man.
Maria Montessori
#67. A humankind abandoned in its earlier formative stage becomes its own greatest threat to survival.
Maria Montessori
#68. Under the urge of nature and according to the laws of development, though not understood by the adult, the child is obliged to be serious about two fundamental things ... the first is the love of activity ... The second fundamental thing is independence.
Maria Montessori
#69. 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.
Maria Montessori
#70. When we want to infuse new ideas,
to modify or better the habits and customs of a people,
to breathe new vigor into its national traits,
we must use the children as our vehicle; for little can be accomplished with adults.
Maria Montessori
#71. Concentration is the key that opens up to the child the latent treasures within him.
Maria Montessori
#72. 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
#73. First the education of the senses, then the education of the intellect.
Maria Montessori
#74. This is the treasure we need today - helping the child become independent of us and make his way by himself, receiving in return his gifts of hope and light.
Maria Montessori
#75. A teacher, therefore, who would think that he could prepare himself for his mission through study alone would be mistaken. The first thing required of a teacher is that he be rightly disposed for his task.
Maria Montessori
#76. 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
#77. The selfsame procedure which zoology, a branch of the natural sciences, applies to the study of animals, anthropology must apply to the study of man; and by doing so, it enrolls itself as a science in the field of nature.
Maria Montessori
#78. The land is where our roots are. The children must be taught to feel and live in harmony with the Earth.
Maria Montessori
#79. Education is a work of self-organization by which man adapts himself to the conditions of life.
Maria Montessori
#80. We must support as much as possible the child's desires for activity; not wait on him, but educate him to be independent.
Maria Montessori
#81. Every great cause is born from repeated failures and from imperfect achievements.
Maria Montessori
#82. It is not in human nature for all men to tread the same path of development, as animals do of a single species.
Maria Montessori
#83. 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
#84. There can be no substitute for work, neither affection nor physical well-being can replace it.
Maria Montessori
#85. 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
#86. The adult ought never to mold the child after himself, but should leave him alone and work always from the deepest comprehension of the child himself.
Maria Montessori
#87. In nature everything is transformed but nothing destroyed.
Maria Montessori
#88. The greatest step forward in human evolution was made when society began to help the weak and the poor, instead of oppressing and despising them.
Maria Montessori
#89. An interesting piece of work, freely chosen, which has the virtue of inducing concentration rather than fatigue, adds to the child's energies and mental capacities, and leads him to self-mastery.
Maria Montessori
#90. The undisciplined child enters into discipline by working in the company of others; not being told he is naughty." "Discipline is, therefore, primarily a learning experience and less a punitive experience if appropriately dealt with.
Maria Montessori
#91. The child seeks for independence by means of work; an independence of body and mind.
Maria Montessori
#92. The adult works to improve his environment while the child works to improve himself.
Maria Montessori
#93. From the child itself he will learn how to perfect himself as an educator.
Maria Montessori
#94. 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
#95. There is in the child a special kind of sensitivity which leads him to absorb everything about him, and it is this work of observing and absorbing that alone enables him to adapt himself to life
Maria Montessori
#96. Children must grow not only in the body but in the spirit, and the mother longs to follow the mysterious spiritual journey of the beloved one who to-morrow will be the intelligent, divine creation, man.
Maria Montessori
#97. The role of education is to interest the child profoundly in an external activity to which he will give all his potential
Maria Montessori
#98. The more the capacity to concentrate is developed, the more often the profound tranquility in work is achieved, then the clearer will be the manifestation of discipline within the child.
Maria Montessori
#99. 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,
Maria Montessori
#100. We must, therefore, quit our roles as jailers and instead take care to prepare an environment in which we do as little as possible to exhaust the child with our surveillance and instruction
Maria Montessori
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