Maria Montessori Quotes

Enjoy the top 369 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Maria Montessori.

“The child should love everything he learns. Whatever is presented to him must be made beautiful and clear. Once this love has been kindled, all problems confronting the educationalist will disappear.”
— Maria Montessori —

“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

“No social problem is as universal as the oppression of the child”

— Maria Montessori

“If education is always to be conceived along the same antiquated lines of a mere transmission of knowledge, there is little to be hoped from it in the bettering of man's future.”

— Maria Montessori

“We shall walk together on this path of life, for all things are part of the universe and are connected with each other to form one whole unity.”

— Maria Montessori

“The first idea the child must acquire is that of the difference between good and evil.”

— Maria Montessori

The only language men ever speak perfectly is the one they learn in babyhood, when no one can teach them anything!

— Maria Montessori

“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

Noble ideas, great sentiments have always existed and have always been transmitted, but wars have never ceased.

— Maria Montessori

The child who concentrates is immensely happy.

— Maria Montessori

“Every one in the world ought to do the things for which he is specially adapted. It is the part of wisdom to recognize what each one of us is best fitted for, and it is the part of education to perfect and utilize such predispositions. Because education can direct and aid nature but can never transform her.”

— Maria Montessori

“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

“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

It is the children between five and seven who are the word-lovers. It is they who show a predisposition toward such study. Their undeveloped minds can not yet grasp a complete idea with distinctness. They do, however, understand words. And they may be entirely carried away by their ecstatic, their tireless interest in the parts of speech.

— Maria Montessori

“The greatest development is achieved during the first years of life, and therefore it is then that the greatest care should be taken. If this is done, then the child does not become a burden; he will reveal himself as the greatest marvel of nature.”

— Maria Montessori

“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

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

“Times have changed, and science has made great progress, and so has our work; but our principles have only been confirmed, and along with them our conviction that mankind can hope for a solution to its problems, among which the most urgent are those of peace and unity, only by turning its attention and energies to the discovery of the child and to the development of the great potentialities of the human personality in the course of its formation.”

— Maria Montessori

“It is true that we cannot make a genius. We can only give to teach child the chance to fulfil his potential possibilities.”

— Maria Montessori

“What the hand does the mind remembers.”

— Maria Montessori

“The child is both a hope and a promise for mankind.”

— Maria Montessori

“Every great cause is born from repeated failures and from imperfect achievements.”

— Maria Montessori

To teach details is to bring confusion; to establish the relationship between things is to bring knowledge.

— Maria Montessori

The child should love everything he learns. Whatever is presented to him must be made beautiful and clear. Once this love has been kindled, all problems confronting the educationalist will disappear.

— Maria Montessori

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

— Maria Montessori

“Let us treat them [children], therefore, with all the kindness which we would wish to help to develop in them.”

— Maria Montessori

“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

“The human hand allows the mind to reveal itself.”

— Maria Montessori

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.

— Maria Montessori

“Concentration is the key that opens up to the child the latent treasures within him.”

— Maria Montessori

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.

— Maria Montessori

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

“The great constructive energies of the child ... have hitherto been concealed beneath an accumulation of ideas concerning motherhood. We used to say it was the mother who formed the child; for it is she who teaches him to walk, talk, and so on. But none of this is really done by the mother. It is an achievement of the child. What the mother brings forth is the baby, but it is the baby who produces the man. Should the mother die, the baby still grows up and completes his work of making the man.”

— Maria Montessori

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

How can we speak of Democracy or Freedom when from the very beginning of life we mould the child to undergo tyranny, to obey a dictator? How can we expect democracy when we have reared slaves? Real freedom begins at the beginning of life, not at the adult stage. These people who have been diminished in their powers, made short-sighted, devitalized by mental fatigue, whose bodies have become distorted, whose wills have been broken by elders who say: "your will must disappear and mine prevail!"-how can we expect them, when school-life is finished, to accept and use the rights of freedom?

— Maria Montessori

“It is necessary, then, to give the child the possibility of developing according to the laws of his nature, so that he can become strong, and, having become strong, can do even more than we dared hope for him.”

— Maria Montessori

“The first thing his education demands is the provision of an environment in which he can develop the powers given him by nature. This does not mean just to amuse him and let him do what he likes. But it does mean that we have to adjust our minds to doing a work of collaboration with nature, to being obedient to one of her laws, the law which decrees that development comes from environmental experience.”

— Maria Montessori

“The activity of the child has always been looked upon as an expression of his vitality.”

— Maria Montessori

“He who is served is limited in his independence.”

— Maria Montessori

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

— Maria Montessori

“In nature nothing creates itself and nothing destroys itself.”