Maria Montessori Quotes

My children, who are almost two: watching them develop has made me pay much closer attention to how we become who we are.

One of the best ways of understanding human nature is to study children. After all, if we want understand who we are, we should find out how we got to be that way.

What interests me is what children go through while growing up.

The most formative time of our lives are the years between birth and age 21, when we explore who we are and learn from those who surround us.

The child is father of the man.

I think much of what you learn as a kid comes before age seven.

When you're little, every experience writes on the canvas of who you are.

Whatever helps to shape the human being - to make the individual what he is, or hinder him from being what he is not - is part of his education.

Men are born, and then they're formed.

The child from nine to 12 interests me very much. And so, those were the years that I like to write about, when I'm writing.

Education commences at the mother's knee, and every word spoken within hearsay of little children tends toward the formation of character.

The first decade of your life is really important; it's formative.

When I was growing up, my mother would take me to plays and museums, and we'd talk about life. Those times helped shape who I became.

It's always been my feeling that God lends you your children until they're about eighteen years old. If you haven't made your points with them by then, it's too late.

Education, like neurosis, begins at home.

Don't try to make children grow up to be like you, or they may do it.

I wanted to answer big questions about humanity, about how it is that we understand about the world, how we can know as much as we do, why human nature is the way that it is. And it always seemed to me that you find answers to those questions by looking at children.

One of the most distinctive evolutionary features of human beings is our unusually long, protected childhood.

It is no wonder that people are so horrible when they start their life as children.

The first six years of a child's life, it is like a tape recorder is on. Everything it sees, smells, touches, experiences in any way, whatever it hears, is being downloaded into the brain before the consciousness of the child is even made apparent.

Only recently - about five minutes ago, relative to the long-running human comedy - have parents been driving themselves to distraction by taking too seriously the idea that 'as the twig is bent the tree's inclined.'

I think the patterns are set very early when the kids are young. But at the same time, there are some flavors kids just don't like.

Give me a child for the first 7 years, and you may do what you like with him afterwards.

The first 3 years of a person’s life determines the next 80 years.

When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.