Maria Montessori Quotes

101 Sourced Quotes

Human dignity... is derived from a sense of independence.

Maria Montessori
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
The task of the educator of young children lies in seeing that the child does not confound good with immobility, and evil with activity.

Maria Montessori
The child is truly a miraculous being, and this should be felt deeply by the educator.

Maria Montessori
We shall walk together on this path of life, for all things are a part of the universe, and are connected with each other to form one whole unity. This idea helps the mind of the child to become fixed, to stop wandering in an aimless quest for knowledge. He is satisfied, having found the universal centre of himself with all things.

Maria Montessori
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.

Maria Montessori
The greatest triumph of our educational method should always be this: to bring about the spontaneous progress of the child.

Maria Montessori
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
Growth comes from activity, not from intellectual understanding.

Maria Montessori
The more perfect the approximation to truth, the more perfect is art.

Maria Montessori
Adults have not understood children or adolescents and they are, as a consequence, in continual conflict with them. The remedy is not that adults should gain some new intellectual knowledge or achieve a higher standard of culture. No, they must find a different point of departure. The adult must find within himself the still unknown error that prevents him from seeing the child as he is.

Maria Montessori
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
The greatness of the human personality begins at the hour of birth. From this almost mystic affirmation there comes what may seem a strange conclusion: that education must start from birth.

Maria Montessori
In the vivid description of the Gospel, it would seem that we must help the Christ hidden in every poor man, in every prisoner, in every sufferer. But if we paraphrased the marvelous scene and applied it to the child, we should find that Christ goes to help all men in the form of the child.

Maria Montessori
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
In nature everything is transformed but nothing destroyed.

Maria Montessori
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
If help and salvation are to come they can only come from the children, for the children are the makers of men.
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
No one can be free unless he is independent... In reality, he who is served is limited in his independence.

Maria Montessori
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
Love and the hope of it are not things one can learn; they are a part of life's heritage.

Maria Montessori
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
The child, making use of all that he finds around him, shapes himself for the future.

Maria Montessori
The first idea that the child must acquire, in order to be actively disciplined, is that of the difference between good and evil; and the task of the educator lies in seeing that the child does not confound good with immobility, and evil with activity.

Maria Montessori
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
Growth is not merely a harmonious increase in size, but a transformation.

Maria Montessori
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
The development of the individual can be described as a succession of new births at consecutively higher levels.

Maria Montessori
A child is mysterious and powerful and contains within himself the secret of human nature.

Maria Montessori
But if for the physical life it is necessary to have the child exposed to the vivifying forces of nature, it is also necessary for his psychical life to place the soul of the child in contact with creation.

Maria Montessori