Maria Montessori

Character formation cannot be taught. It comes from experience and not from explanation.

No adult can bear a child’s burden or grow up in his stead.

The child builds his inmost self out of the deeply held impressions he receives.

These words reveal the child’s inner needs; ‘Help me to do it alone’.

Free choice is one of the highest of all the mental processes.

The hands are the instruments of man’s intelligence.

The human hand allows the mind to reveal itself.

The essence of independence is to be able to do something for one’s self.

The child becomes a person through work.

The first essential for the child’s development is concentration. The child who concentrates is immensely happy.

Respect all the reasonable forms of activity in which the child engages and try to understand them.

If an educational act is to be efficacious, it will be only that one which tends to help toward the complete unfolding of life. To be thus helpful it is necessary rigorously to avoid the arrest of spontaneous movements and the imposition of arbitrary tasks.

The teacher must derive not only the capacity, but the desire, to observe natural phenomena. The teacher must understand and feel her position of observer: the activity must lie in the phenomenon.

The first idea that the child must acquire, in order to be actively disciplined, is that of the difference between good and evil.

If help and salvation are to come they can only come from the children, for the children are the makers of men.

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

One test of the correctness of educational procedure is the happiness of the child.

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. For what is the use of transmitting knowledge if the individual's total development lags behind?

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

Play is the work of the child.

The greatness of the human personality begins at the hour of birth.