Maria Montessori Quotes

In the first year of a child's life we teach them to walk and talk. And then for the rest of their lives we want them to sit down and be quiet.

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.

Don't limit a child to your own learning, for he was born in another time.

A child's greatest achievements are possible in play, achievements that tomorrow will become her basic level of real action.

Learning to dislike children at an early age saves a lot of expense and aggravation later in life.

America's future will be determined by the home and the school. The child becomes largely what he is taught; hence we must watch what we teach, and how we live.

I love being around kids; they're honest and refreshing, and I love teaching them new things.

There have been two areas identified as being vital to reading - and that's for very young children between the ages of one month and five years and for teenagers. I've been trying to find ways of approaching both groups.

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

I believe a child's most important job is to explore the world around them through play.

Education is helping the child realise his potentialities.

As children, we are remarkably aware. We absorb and process information at a speed that we'll never again come close to achieving... we are learning about our world and its possibilities.

There is something very cheerful and courageous in the setting-out of a child on a journey of speech with so small baggage and with so much confidence.

For success in training children the first condition is to become as a child oneself, but this means no assumed childishness, no condescending baby-talk that the child immediately sees through and deeply abhors. What it does mean is to be as entirely and simply taken up with the child as the child himself is absorbed by his life.

Someone once told me that children are like heroin. You always want more. Yet first-borns are special because you'll never have your first child again.

Children are forced to live very rapidly in order to live at all. They are given only a few years in which to learn hundreds of thousands of things about life and the planet and themselves.

Society has provided [children] no rituals by which they become members of the tribe, of the community. All children need to be twice born, to learn to function rationally in the present world, leaving childhood behind.

The reason teaching has to go on is that children are not born human; they are made so.

I want to get back to education. When I was in college I paid attention to child psychology portions of our psychology classes. I watch other people work with babies. And I saw the baby as developing like a computer and it intrigued me in my life. I wanted to do that.

Every child's bedroom is as important as a telescope orbiting the planet earth or a philosopher's study.

The most important period of life is not the age of university studies, but the first one, the period from birth to the age of six.

I do not teach children, I give them joy.

Teaching which ignores the realities of children will be rejected as surely as any graft which attempts to ignore the body's immune system.

Children are like grown people; the experience of others is never of any use to them.

The little child learns to speak, though it has no learned teachers - because it lives with those who know how to speak.