467 Quotes by Maria Montessori

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

It is not the child as a physical but as a psychic being that can provide a strong impetus to the betterment of mankind. It is the spirit of the child that can determine the course of human progress and lead it perhaps even to a higher form of civilization.

The best instruction is that which uses the least words sufficient for the task.

Education must start from birth.

It is easy to substitute our will for that of the child by means of suggestion or coercion; but when we have done this we have robbed him of his greatest right, the right to construct his own personality.

Discipline must come through liberty. . . . We do not consider an individual disciplined only when he has been rendered as artificially silent as a mute and as immovable as a paralytic. He is an individual annihilated, not disciplined.

He who is served is limited in his independence.

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

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