Top 50 Charlotte Mason Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Education is an atmosphere, a discipline, a life.”

— Charlotte Mason

Featured in: Discipline Quotes

2. “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.”

— Charlotte Mason

3. “An observant child should be put in the way of things worth observing.”

— Charlotte Mason

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

— Charlotte Mason

5. “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.”

— Charlotte Mason

6. “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?”

— Charlotte Mason

7. “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.”

— Charlotte Mason

8. “Education, like faith, is the evidence of things not seen.”

— Charlotte Mason

9. “Let children feed on the good, the excellent, the great! Don’t get in their way with little lectures, facts, and guided tours!”

— Charlotte Mason

10. “Never be within doors when you can rightly be without.”

— Charlotte Mason

11. “Every day, every hour, the parents are either passively or actively forming those habits in their children upon which, more than upon anything else, future character and conduct depend...”

— Charlotte Mason

12. “There is no education but self-education.”

— Charlotte Mason

13. “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.”

— Charlotte Mason

14. “For the mind is capable of dealing with only one kind of food; it lives, grows and is nourished upon ideas only; mere information is to it as a meal of sawdust to the body; there are no organs for the assimilation of the one more than of the other.”

— Charlotte Mason

15. “The indwelling of Christ is a thought particularly fit for the children, because their large faith does not stumble at the mystery, their imagination leaps readily to the marvel, that the King Himself should inhabit a little child’s heart.”

— Charlotte Mason

16. “Education is a life; that life is sustained on ideas; ideas are of spiritual origin, and that we get them chiefly as we convey them to one another. The duty of parents is to sustain a child’s inner life with ideas as they sustain his body with food.”

— Charlotte Mason

17. “In this time of extraordinary pressure, educational and social, perhaps a mother’s first duty to her children is to secure for them a quiet and growing time, a full six years of passive receptive life, the waking part of it for the most part spent out in the fresh air.”

— Charlotte Mason

18. “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.”

— Charlotte Mason

19. “Wise and purposeful letting alone is the best part of education.”

— Charlotte Mason

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

— Charlotte Mason

21. “Give your child a single valuable idea, and you have done more for his education than if you had laid upon his mind the burden of bushels of information.”

— Charlotte Mason

22. “Every walk should offer some knotty problem for the children to think out-“Why does that leaf float on the water, and this pebble sink?” and so on.”

— Charlotte Mason

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

— Charlotte Mason

24. “Therefore, teaching, talk and tale, however lucid or fascinating, effect nothing until self-activity be set up; that is, self-education is the only possible education; the rest is mere veneer laid on the surface of a child’s nature.”

— Charlotte Mason

25. “The formation of habits is education, and education is the formation of habits.”

— Charlotte Mason

26. “Let children have tales of the imagination, scenes laid in other lands and other times; heroic adventures, hairbreadth escapes, delicious fairy tales, even where it is all impossible, and they know it, and yet they believe.”

— Charlotte Mason

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

— Charlotte Mason

28. “We attempt to define a person, the most commonplace person we know, but he will not submit to bounds; some unexpected beauty of nature breaks out; we find he is not what we thought, and begin to suspect that every person exceeds our power of measurement.”

— Charlotte Mason

29. “A child is a person in whom all possibilities are present – present now at this very moment – not to be educed after many years and efforts manifold on the part of the educator.”

— Charlotte Mason

30. “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.”

— Charlotte Mason

31. “So much for the right books; the right use of them is another matter. The children must enjoy the book. The ideas it holds must each make that sudden, delightful impact upon their minds, must cause that intellectual stir, which mark the inception of an idea.”

— Charlotte Mason

32. “Composition is as natural as jumping and running to children who have been allowed due use of books.”

— Charlotte Mason

33. “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.”

— Charlotte Mason

34. “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.”

— Charlotte Mason

35. “Every common miracle which the child sees with his own eyes makes of him for the moment another Newton.”

— Charlotte Mason

36. “The mother who takes pains to endow her children with good habits secures for herself smooth and easy days; while she who lets their habits take care of themselves has a weary life of endless friction with the children.”

— Charlotte Mason

37. “One more thing is of vital importance; children must have books, living books; the best are not too good for them; anything less than the best is not good enough; and if it is needful to exercise economy, let go everything that belongs to soft and luxurious living before letting go the duty of supplying the books, and the frequent changes of books, which are necessary for the constant stimulation of the child’s intellectual life.”

— Charlotte Mason

38. “And all the time we have books, books teeming with ideas fresh from the minds of thinkers upon every subject to which we can wish to introduce children.”

— Charlotte Mason

39. “To bring the human race, family by family, child by child, out of the savage and inhuman desolation where He is not, into the light and warmth and comfort of the presence of God, is, no doubt, the chief thing we have to do in the world.”

— Charlotte Mason

40. “Therefore, the selection of their first lesson-books is a matter of grave importance, because it rests with these to give children the idea that knowledge is supremely attractive and that reading is delightful. Once.”

— Charlotte Mason

41. “That parents should make over the religious education of their children to a Sunday School is, no doubt, as indefensible as if they sent them for their meals to a table maintained by the public bounty.”

— Charlotte Mason

42. “We talk of lost ideals, but perhaps they are not lost, only changed; when our ideal for ourselves and for our children becomes limited to prosperity and comfort, we get these, very likely, for ourselves and for them, but we get no more.”

— Charlotte Mason

43. “And perhaps it is not too beautiful a thing to believe in this redeemed world, that, as the babe turns to his mother though he has no power to say her name, as the flowers turn to the sun, so the hearts of the children turn to their Saviour and God with unconscious delight and trust. Nursery.”

— Charlotte Mason

44. “Every person exceeds our power of measurement.”

— Charlotte Mason

45. “Profound thought is conveyed in language of very great simplicity and purity.”

— Charlotte Mason

46. “Let the parent ask “Why?” and the child produce the answer, if he can. After he has turned the matter over in his mind, there is no harm in telling him – and he will remember it – the reason why.”

— Charlotte Mason

47. “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.”

— Charlotte Mason

48. “A child gets moral notions from the fairy-tales he delights in, as do his elders from tale and verse.”

— Charlotte Mason

49. “The problem before the educator is to give the child control over his own nature, to enable him to hold himself in hand as much in regard to the traits we call good, as to those we call evil:.”

— Charlotte Mason

50. “Who can take the measure of a child? The Genie of the Arabian tale is nothing to him. He, too, may be let out of his bottle and fill the world. But woe to us if we keep him corked up.”

— Charlotte Mason