Top 250 Maria Montessori Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “A humankind abandoned in its earlier formative stage becomes its own greatest threat to survival.”

— Maria Montessori

202. “Happiness is not the whole aim of education. A man must be independent in his powers and character; able to work and assert his mastery over all that depends on him.”

— Maria Montessori

203. “Adults have not understood children or adolescents and they are, as a consequence, in continual conflict with them.”

— Maria Montessori

204. “The study of love and its utilization will lead us to the source from which it springs, The Child.”

— Maria Montessori

205. “The child should love everything he learns. Whatever is presented to him must be made beautiful and clear. Once this love has been kindled, all problems confronting the educationalist will disappear.”

— Maria Montessori

206. “The objects in our system are instead a help to the child himself, he chooses what he wants for his own use, and works with it according to his own needs, tendencies and special interests. In this way, the objects become a means of growth.”

— Maria Montessori

207. “A teacher, therefore, who would think that he could prepare himself for his mission through study alone would be mistaken. The first thing required of a teacher is that he be rightly disposed for his task.”

— Maria Montessori

208. “One of the great problems facing men is their failure to realize the fact that a child possesses an active psychic life even when he cannot manifest it, and that the child must secretly perfect this inner life over a long period of time.”

— Maria Montessori

209. “The children are now working as if I did not exist.”

— Maria Montessori

210. “Needless help is an actual hindrance to the development of natural forces.”

— Maria Montessori

211. “We serve the future by protecting the present.”

— Maria Montessori

212. “What advice can we give to new mothers? Their children need to work at an interesting occupation: they should not be helped unnecessarily, nor interrupted, once they have begun to do something intelligent.”

— Maria Montessori

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

— Maria Montessori

214. “The child has other powers than ours, and the creation he achieves is no small one; it is everything.”

— Maria Montessori

215. “Bring the child to the consciousness of his own dignity and he will feel free.”

— Maria Montessori

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

— Maria Montessori

217. “It is not in human nature for all men to tread the same path of development, as animals do of a single species.”

— Maria Montessori

218. “But the love of man for man is a far more tender thing, and so simple that it is universal. To love in this way is not the privilege of any especially prepared intellectual class, but lies within the reach of all men.”

— Maria Montessori

219. “Do not offer the child the content of the mind, but the order for that content.”

— Maria Montessori

220. “The adult ought never to mold the child after himself, but should leave him alone and work always from the deepest comprehension of the child himself.”

— Maria Montessori

221. “A new education from birth onwards must be built up. Education must be reconstructed and based on the law of nature and not on the preconceived notions and prejudices of adult society.”

— Maria Montessori

222. “The greatest source of discouragement is the conviction that one is unable to do something.”

— Maria Montessori

223. “I succeeded in teaching a number of the idiots from the asylums both to read and to write so well that I was able to present them at a public school for an examination together with normal children. And they passed the examination successfully.”

— Maria Montessori

224. “For what is the use of transmitting knowledge if the individual’s total development lags behind?”

— Maria Montessori

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

— Maria Montessori

226. “As a rule, however, we do not respect our children. We try to force them to follow us without regard to their special needs. We are overbearing with them, and above all, rude; and then we expect them to be submissive and well-behaved, knowing all the time how strong is their instinct of imitation and how touching their faith in and admiration of us.”

— Maria Montessori

227. “The world of education is like an island where people cut off from the world are prepared for life by exclusion from it.”

— Maria Montessori

228. “We must clearly understand that when we give the child freedom and independence, we are giving freedom to a worker already braced for action, who cannot live without working and being active.”

— Maria Montessori

229. “Great tact and delicacy is necessary for the care of the mind of a child from three to six years, and an adult can have very little of it.”

— Maria Montessori

230. “From the child itself he will learn how to perfect himself as an educator.”

— Maria Montessori

231. “With younger children the greatest reward is to be able to pass on to a new stage in each subject. It is a punishment to a young child not to be allowed to use the apparatus but to sit still and do nothing.”

— Maria Montessori

232. “A great deal of time and intellectual force are lost in the world, because the false seems great and the truth so small and insignificant.”

— Maria Montessori

233. “The first thing required of a teacher is that he be rightly disposed for his task.”

— Maria Montessori

234. “While everyone was admiring the progress of my idiots, I was searching for the reasons which could keep the happy healthy children of the common schools on so low a plane that they could be equalled in tests of intelligence by my unfortunate pupils!”

— Maria Montessori

235. “At about a year and a half, the child discovers another fact, and that is that each thing has its own name.”

— Maria Montessori

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

— Maria Montessori

237. “A man is not what he is because of the teachers he has had, but because of what he has done.”

— Maria Montessori

238. “In nature nothing creates itself and nothing destroys itself.”

— Maria Montessori

239. “The school must permit the free, natural manifestations of the child if in the school scientific pedagogy is to be born. This is the essential reform. No one may affirm that such a.”

— Maria Montessori

240. “We wish the old things because we cannot understand the new, and we are always seeking after that gorgeousness which belongs to things already on the decline, without recognising in the humble simplicity of new ideas the germ which shall develop in the future.”

— Maria Montessori

241. “Such prizes and punishments are, if I may be allowed the expression, the bench of the soul, the instrument of slavery for the spirit.”

— Maria Montessori

242. “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

243. “The development of the individual can be described as a succession of new births at consecutively higher levels.”

— Maria Montessori

244. “If a child finds no stimuli for the activities which would contribute to his development, he is attracted simply to ‘things’ and desires to posses them.”

— Maria Montessori

245. “Others, after having studied children carefully, have come to the conclusion that the first two years are the most important of life. Education during this period must be intended as a help to the development of the psychic powers inherent in the human individual.”

— Maria Montessori

246. “Even so those who teach little children too often have the idea that they are educating babies and seek to place themselves on the child’s level by approaching him with games, and often with foolish stories. Instead of all this, we must know how to call to the man which lies dormant within the soul of the child.”

— Maria Montessori

247. “If the child shows through its conversation that the educational work of the school is being undermined by the attitude taken in his home, he will be sent back to his parents, to teach them thus how to take advantage of their good opportunities.”

— Maria Montessori

248. “The environment acts more strongly upon the individual life the less fixed and strong this individual life may be.”

— Maria Montessori

249. “The little fellow had been about to feel himself a conqueror, and he found himself held within two imprisoning arms, impotent. The expression of joy, anxiety, and hope, which had interested me so much faded from his face and left on it the stupid expression of the child who knows that others will act for him.”

— Maria Montessori

250. “The true basis of the imagination is reality.”

— Maria Montessori