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

Observation, very general and wide-spread, has shown that small children are endowed with a special psychic nature. This shows us a new way of imparting education!
Maria Montessori

The first idea the child must acquire is that of the difference between good and evil.
Maria Montessori

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

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.
Maria Montessori

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.
Maria Montessori

The child who concentrates is immensely happy.
Maria Montessori

Never help a child with a task at which he feels he can succeed.
Maria Montessori

We discovered that education is not something which the teacher does, but that it is a natural process which develops spontaneously in the human being.
Maria Montessori

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

Now, what really makes a teacher is love for the human child; for it is love that transforms the social duty of the educator into the higher consciousness of a mission.
Maria Montessori

The child is not an empty being who owes whatever he knows to us who have filled him up with it. No, the child is the builder of man. There is no man existing who has not been formed by the child he once was.
Maria Montessori

Personal health is related to self-control and to the worship of life in all its natural beauty - self-control bringing with it happiness, renewed youth, and long life.
Maria Montessori

Free the child's potential, and you will transform him into the world.
Maria Montessori

The child's mind is not the type of mind we adults possess. If we call our type of mind the conscious type, that of the child is an unconscious mind. Now an unconscious mind does not mean an inferior mind. An unconscious mind can be full of intelligence. One will find this type of intelligence in every being, and every insect has it.
Maria Montessori

If intelligence is the triumph of life, the spoken word is the marvellous means by which this intelligence is manifested.
Maria Montessori

The chief symptom of adolescence is a state of expectation, a tendency towards creative work, and a need for the strengthening of self-confidence. Suddenly, the child becomes very sensitive to the rudeness and humiliations which he had previously suffered with patient indifference.
Maria Montessori

When you have solved the problem of controlling the attention of the child, you have solved the entire problem of its education.
Maria Montessori

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?
Maria Montessori

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

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.
Maria Montessori

The respect and protection of woman and of maternity should be raised to the position of an inalienable social duty and should become one of the principles of human morality.
Maria Montessori

It is not true that I invented what is called the Montessori Method... I have studied the child; I have taken what the child has given me and expressed it, and that is what is called the Montessori Method.
Maria Montessori

The person who is developing freely and naturally arrives at a spiritual equilibrium in which he is master of his actions, just as one who has acquired physical poise can move freely.
Maria Montessori

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

Establishing lasting peace is the work of education; all politics can do is keep us out of war.
Maria Montessori

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