Selected Quotes By Maria Montessori
"The school must permit the free, natural manifestations of the child if in the school scientific pedagogy is to be born. This is the essential reform."
Maria Montessori, Freedom, Intelligence/Wisdom
"The little fellow had been about to feel himself a conqueror, and he found himself held within two imprisoning arms, impotent. The expression of joy, anxiety, and hope, which had interested me so much faded from his face and left on it the stupid expression of the child who knows that others will act for him."
Maria Montessori, Freedom
"For a man is not only a biological but a social product, and the social environment of individuals in the process of education, is the home. Scientific pedagogy will seek in vain to better the new generation if it does not succeed in influencing also the environment within which this new generation grows!"
Maria Montessori, Society, Intelligence/Wisdom
"This is what is intended by education as a help to life; an education from birth that brings about a revolution: a revolution that eliminates every violence, a revolution in which everyone will be attracted towards a common center. Mothers, fathers, statesmen all will be centered upon respecting and aiding this delicate construction which is carried on in psychic mystery following the guide of an inner teacher. This is the new shining hope for humanity. It is not so much a reconstruction, as an aid to the construction carried out by the human soul as it is meant to be, developed in all the immense potentialities with which the new-born child is endowed."
Maria Montessori, Goals, Society
"Nor can we expect exactly similar results from children whose heredity and experience make them at once more sensitive, more active, and less amenable to."
Maria Montessori, Life
"The true basis of the imagination is reality."
Maria Montessori, Life, Intelligence/Wisdom, Truth
"But the love of man for man is a far more tender thing, and so simple that it is universal. To love in this way is not the privilege of any especially prepared intellectual class, but lies within the reach of all men."
Maria Montessori, Society, Love
"We give the name scientist to the type of man who has felt experiment to be a means guiding him to search out the deep truth of life, to lift a veil from its fascinating secrets, and who, in this pursuit, has felt arising within him a love for the mysteries of nature, so passionate as to annihilate the thought of himself."
Maria Montessori, Life, Science
"I succeeded in teaching a number of the idiots from the asylums both to read and to write so well that I was able to present them at a public school for an examination together with normal children. And they passed the examination successfully."
Maria Montessori, Success
"A teacher simply assists him at the beginning to get his bearings among so many different things and teaches him the precise use of each of them; that is to say, she introduces him to the ordered and active life of the environment. But then she leaves him free in the choice and execution of his work."
Maria Montessori, Work, Freedom
"I was more than an elementary teacher, for I was present, or directly taught the children, from eight in the morning to seven in the evening without interruption. These two years of practice are my first and indeed my true degree in pedagogy."
Maria Montessori, Work
"To assist a child we must provide him with an environment which will enable him to develop freely."
Maria Montessori, Goals, Freedom
"There does exist, however, an external prize for man; when, for example, the orator sees the faces of his listeners change with the emotions he has awakened, he experiences something so great that it can only be likened to the intense joy with which one discovers that he is loved. Our joy is to touch, and conquer souls, and this is the one prize which can bring us a true compensation. Sometimes there is given to us a moment when we fancy ourselves to be among the great ones of the world. These are moments of happiness given to man that he may continue his existence in peace."
Maria Montessori, Happiness
"the fundamental phrase which sums up Séguin's whole method,—"to lead the child, as it were, by the hand, from the education of the muscular system, to that of the nervous system, and of the senses." It was thus that Séguin taught the idiots how to walk, how to maintain their equilibrium in the most difficult movements of the body—such as going up stairs, jumping, etc., and finally, to feel, beginning the education of the muscular sensations by touching, and reading the difference of temperature, and ending with the education of the particular senses."
Maria Montessori, Work, Goals
"I withdrew from active work among deficients, and began a more thorough study of the works of Itard and Séguin. I felt the need of meditation. I did a thing which I had not done before, and which perhaps few students have been willing to do,—I translated into Italian and copied out with my own hand, the writings of these men, from beginning to end, making for myself books as the old Benedictines used to do before the diffusion of printing."
Maria Montessori, Work
"When the teacher shall have touched, in this way, soul for soul, each one of her pupils, awakening and inspiring the life within them as if she were an invisible spirit, she will then possess each soul, and a sign, a single word from her shall suffice; for each one will feel her in a living and vital way, will recognise her and will listen to her. There will come a day when the directress herself shall be filled with wonder to see that all the children obey her with gentleness and affection, not only ready, but intent, at a sign from her. They will look toward her who has made them live, and will hope and desire to receive from her, new life."
Maria Montessori, Work
"you do not exist, you cannot hope to grow. That is the tremendous step the child takes, the step that goes from nothing to something."
Maria Montessori, Life
"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, Intelligence/Wisdom
"As a rule, however, we do not respect our children. We try to force them to follow us without regard to their special needs. We are overbearing with them, and above all, rude; and then we expect them to be submissive and well-behaved, knowing all the time how strong is their instinct of imitation and how touching their faith in and admiration of us."
Maria Montessori, Society
"Even so those who teach little children too often have the idea that they are educating babies and seek to place themselves on the child's level by approaching him with games, and often with foolish stories. Instead of all this, we must know how to call to the man which lies dormant within the soul of the child."
Maria Montessori, Intelligence/Wisdom
"The environment acts more strongly upon the individual life the less fixed and strong this individual life may be."
Maria Montessori, Life
"What is generally known as discipline in traditional schools is not activity, but immobility and silence. It is not discipline, but something that festers inside a child, arousing his rebellious feelings."
Maria Montessori, Intelligence/Wisdom
"Needless help is an actual hindrance to the development of natural forces."
Maria Montessori, Life
"Only through freedom and environmental experience is it practically possible for human development to occur."
Maria Montessori, Freedom
"We serve the future by protecting the present."
Maria Montessori, Goals
"Children become like the things they love."
Maria Montessori, Society, Love
"We wish the old things because we cannot understand the new, and we are always seeking after that gorgeousness which belongs to things already on the decline, without recognising in the humble simplicity of new ideas the germ which shall develop in the future."
Maria Montessori, Society, Ideas
"The best instruction is that which uses the least words sufficient for the task."
Maria Montessori, Intelligence/Wisdom
"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."
Maria Montessori, Intelligence/Wisdom
"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, Society, Life
"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, Intelligence/Wisdom
"Our work is not to teach, but to help the absorbent mind in its work of development. How marvelous it would be if by our help, if by an intelligent treatment of the child, if by understanding the needs of his physical life and by feeding his intellect, we could prolong the period of functioning of the absorbent mind!"
Maria Montessori, Work
"The essence of independence is to be able to do something for one’s self."
Maria Montessori, Freedom
"The task of the educator lies in seeing that the child does not confound good with immobility and evil with activity."
Maria Montessori, Work
"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, Freedom
"If salvation and help are to come, it is through the child ; for the child is the constructor of man."
Maria Montessori, Society
"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, Intelligence/Wisdom
"The environment must be rich in motives which lend interest to activity and invite the child to conduct his own experiences."
Maria Montessori, Intelligence/Wisdom
"To stimulate life, leaving it free, however, to unfold itself--that is the first duty of the educator."
Maria Montessori, Life, Intelligence/Wisdom
"Respect all the reasonable forms of activity in which the child engages and try to understand them."
Maria Montessori, Goals
"The things he sees are not just remembered; they form a part of his soul."
Maria Montessori, Intelligence/Wisdom
"Preventing war is the work of politicians, establishing peace is the work of educationists."
Maria Montessori, Intelligence/Wisdom, Government, Anger and Fighting
"Do not erase the designs the child makes in the soft wax of his inner life."
Maria Montessori, Goals, Life
"Children are human beings to whom respect is due, superior to us by reason of their innocence and of the greater possibilities of their future."
Maria Montessori, Society
"Scientific observation then has established that education is not what the teacher gives; education is a natural process spontaneously carried out by the human individual, and is acquired not by listening to words but by experiences upon the environment."
Maria Montessori, Intelligence/Wisdom
"No social problem is as universal as the oppression of the child."
Maria Montessori, Freedom
"Of all things love is the most potent."
Maria Montessori, Love
"Within the child lies the fate of the future."
Maria Montessori, Life
"Establishing lasting peace is the work of education; all politics can do is keep us out of war."
Maria Montessori, Intelligence/Wisdom, Government, Anger and Fighting
"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, Success
"We cannot know the consequences of suppressing a child's spontaneity when he is just beginning to be active. We may even suffocate life itself. That humanity which is revealed in all its intellectual splendor during the sweet and tender age of childhood should be respected with a kind of religious veneration. It is like the sun which appears at dawn or a flower just beginning to bloom. Education cannot be effective unless it helps a child to open up himself to life."
Maria Montessori, Life, Intelligence/Wisdom
"Never help a child with a task at which he feels he can succeed."
Maria Montessori, Goals, Success
"It is not enough for the teacher to love the child. She must first love and understand the universe. She must prepare herself, and truly work at it."
Maria Montessori, Love, Work
"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, Intelligence/Wisdom
"If you can feel that staying human is worth while, even when it can't have any result whatever, you've beaten them."