Quotes from Maria Montessori

Early childhood education is the key to the betterment of society.

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.

Our goal is not so much the imparting of knowledge as the unveiling and developing of spiritual energy.

Conventions which camouflage a man's true feelings are a spiritual lie which help him adapt himself to the organized deviations of society.

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.

Concentration is a part of life. It is not the consequence of a method of education.

The concept of an education centered upon the care of the living being alters all previous ideas. Resting no longer on a curriculum, or a timetable, education must conform to the facts of human life.

To aid life, leaving it free, however, that is the basic task of the educator.

This then is the first duty of an educator: to stir up life but leave it free to develop.

It follows that at the beginning of his life the individual can accomplish wonders without effort and quite unconsciously.

We must therefore turn to the child as to the key to the fate of our future life.

Education, as conceived today, is something separated both from biological and social life.

We seek to sow life in the child rather than theories, to help him in his growth, mental and emotional as well as physical, and for that we must offer grand and lofty ideas to the human mind.

The child who concentrates is immensely happy.

To confer the gift of drawing, we must create an eye that sees, a hand that obeys, a soul that feels; and in this task, the whole life must cooperate. In this sense, life itself is the only preparation for drawing. Once we have lived, the inner spark of vision does the rest.

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.

My system is to be considered a system leading up, in a general way, to education. It can be followed not only in the education of little children from three to six years of age, but can be extended to children up to ten years of age.

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

When children come into contact with nature, they reveal their strength.

Order is one of the needs of life which, when it is satisfied, produces a real happiness

It is fortunate, I think, that nature is not bounded by human reason and by laboratory work and experimentation, for by the laws of pure reason and by microscopic investigation, it might easily have been proved, long before this, that children could not be born.

The purpose of life is to obey the hidden command which ensures harmony among all and creates an ever better world. We are not created only to enjoy the world, we are created in order to evolve the cosmos.

To stimulate life, leaving it then free to develop, to unfold, herein lies the first task of the teacher.

A man is not what he is because of the teachers he has had, but because of what he has done