Quotes from Charlotte Mason

The mother who takes pains to endow her children with good habits secures for herself smooth and easy days.

Authority is just and faithful in all matters of promise-keeping; it is also considerate, and that is why a good mother is the best home-ruler.

Every person exceeds our power of measurement.

Look on education as something between the child's soul and God. Modern Education tends to look on it as something between the child's brain and the standardized test.

The peculiar value of geography lies in its fitness to nourish the mind with ideas and furnish the imagination with pictures.

Imagination does not stir at the suggestion of the feeble, much diluted stuff that is too often put into childrenÂ's hands.

We have never been so rich in books. But there has never been a generation when there is so much twaddle in print for children.

We are all meant to be naturalists, each in his own degree, and it is inexcusable to live in a world so full of the marvels of plant and animal life and to care for none of these things.

We all have need to be trained to see, and to have our eyes opened before we can take in the joy that is meant for us in this beautiful life.

Education is an atmosphere, a discipline, a life

The teacher who allows his scholars the freedom of the city of books is at liberty to be their guide, philosopher and friend; and is no longer the mere instrument of forcible intellectual feeding.

Of all the joyous motives of school life, the love of knowledge is the only abiding one; the only one which determines the scale, so to speak, upon which the person will hereafter live.

Of the three sorts of knowledge proper to a child, the knowledge of God, of man, and of the universe,--the knowledge of God ranks first in importance, is indispensable, and most happy-making.

The question is not, -- how much does the youth know? when he has finished his education -- but how much does he care? and about how many orders of things does he care? In fact, how large is the room in which he finds his feet set? and, therefore, how full is the life he has before him?

Self-education is the only possible education; the rest is mere veneer laid on the surface of a child's nature.

Thought breeds thought; children familiar with great thoughts take as naturally to thinking for themselves as the well-nourished body takes to growing; and we must bear in mind that growth, physical, intellectual, moral, spiritual, is the sole end of education.

The most common and the monstrous defect in the education of the day is that children fail to acquire the habit of reading.

If mothers could learn to do for themselves what they do for their children when these are overdone, we should have happier households. Let the mother go out to play!

my object is to show that the chief function of the child--his business in the world during the first six or seven years of his life--is to find out all he can, about whatever comes under his notice, by means of his five senses...

Do not let the endless succession of small things crowd great ideals out of sight and out of mind.

There is no education but self-education.

Let children alone... the education of habit is successful in so far as it enables the mother to let her children alone, not teasing them with perpetual commands and directions - a running fire of Do and Don't ; but letting them go their own way and grow, having first secured that they will go the right way and grow to fruitful purpose.

Having found the book which has a message for us, let us not be guilty of the folly of saying we have read it. We might as well say we have breakfasted, as if breakfasting on one day should last us for every day! The book that helps us deserves many readings, for assimilation comes by slow degrees.

like Ariel released from his tree prison, a beautiful human being leaps out of many a human prison at the touch of sympathy .