Maria Montessori
Children become like the things they love.Collection: Children
To let the child do as he likes when he has not yet developed any powers of control is to betray the idea of freedom.Collection: Children
A child is an eager observer and is particularly attracted by the actions of the adults and wants to imitate them. In this regard an adult can have a kind of mission. He can be an inspiration for the child's actions, a kind of open book wherein a child can learn how to direct his own movements. But an adult, if he is to afford 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.Collection: Children
The child should live in an environment of beauty.Collection: Children
Praise, help, or even a look, may be enough to interrupt him, or destroy the activity. It seems a strange thing to say, but this can happen even if the child merely becomes aware of being watched. After all, we too sometimes feel unable to go on working if someone comes to see what we are doing. The great principle which brings success to the teacher is this: as soon as concentration has begun, act as if the child does not exist. Naturally, one can see what he is doing with a quick glance, but without his being aware of it.Collection: Teacher
The unknown energy that can help humanity is that which lies hidden in the child.Collection: Children
Within the child lies the fate of the future.Collection: Children
The child who concentrates is immensely happyCollection: Children
The best instruction is that which uses the least words sufficient for the task.Collection: Tasks
The child can only develop fully by means of experience in his environment. We call such experience 'work'.Collection: Children
The development of the mind comes through movementCollection: Mind
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.Collection: Errors
The teacher's task is not a small easy one! She has to prepare a huge amount of knowledge to satisfy the child's mental hunger. She is not like the ordinary teacher, limited by a syllabus. The needs of the child are clearly more difficult to answer.Collection: Teacher
Two things are necessary, the development of individuality and the participation of the individual in a truly social life.Collection: Two
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.Collection: Children
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.Collection: Children
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 lifeCollection: Children
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.Collection: Discipline
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.Collection: Children
Imitation is the first instinct of the awakening mind.Collection: Mind
The child will reveal himself through work.Collection: Children
The child, in fact, once he feels sure of himself, will no longer seek the approval of authority after every step.Collection: Children
The real preparation for education is the study of one's self.Collection: Real
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.Collection: Children
Growth is not merely a harmonious increase in size, but a transformation.Collection: Growth
The role of education is to interest the child profoundly in an external activity to which he will give all his potentialCollection: Children
A child is a discoverer. He is an amorphous, splendid being in search of his own proper form.Collection: Children
No one can be free unless he is independent.Collection: Independent
The social rights of children must be recognized so that a world suited to their needs may be constructed for them. The greatest crime that society commits is that of wasting the money which it should use for children on things that will destroy them and society itself as well.Collection: Children
We teachers can only help the work going on, as servants wait upon a master. We then become witnesses to the development of the human soul; the emergence of the New Man who will no longer be the victim of events but, thanks to his clarity of vision, will become able to direct and to mold the future of mankind.Collection: Teacher
The hand is the prehensile organ of the mind.Collection: Hands
My vision of the future is no longer of people taking exams and proceeding from secondary school to University but of passing from one stage of independence to a higher, by means of their own activity and effort of will.Collection: School
All human victories, all human progress, stand upon the inner force.Collection: Victory
Within the child lies the fate of the future. Whoever wishes to confer some benefit on society must preserve him from deviations and observe his natural ways of acting. A child is mysterious and powerful and contains within himself the secret of human nature.Collection: Children
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.Collection: Stars
No one can be free unless he is independent. Therefore, the first active manifestations of the child's individual liberty must be so guided that through this activity he may arrive at independence.Collection: Children
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.Collection: Society
The child’s parents are not his makers but his guardians.Collection: Children
Solicitous care for living things affords satisfaction to one of the most lively instincts of the child's mind. Nothing is better calculated than this to awaken an attitude of foresight.Collection: Children
There are many things which no teacher can convey to a child of three, but a child of five can do it with ease.Collection: Teacher
Since it is through movement that the will realises itself, we should assist a child in his attempts to put his will into act.Collection: Children
The activity of the child has always been looked upon as an expression of his vitality.Collection: Children
If children are allowed free development and given occupation to correspond with their unfolding minds their natural goodness will shine forth.Collection: Children
The ‘absorbent mind’ welcomes everything, puts its hope in everything, accepts poverty equally with wealth, adopts any religion and the prejudices and habits of its countrymen, incarnating all in itself. This is the child!Collection: Children
The child becomes a person through work.Collection: Children
The study of love and its utilization will lead us to the source from which it springs, The Child.Collection: Children
We must therefore turn to the child as to the key to the fate of our future life.Collection: Children
Bring the child to the consciousness of his own dignity and he will feel free.Collection: Children
How often is the soul of man - especially in childhood - deprived because he is not allowed to come in contact with nature.Collection: Men