Maria Montessori quotes

Maria Montessori was an Italian physician and educator, best known for developing the Montessori method of education. Her innovative approach emphasized independence, hands-on learning, and respect for a child’s natural psychological development. She inspired a global movement in education that continues to influence schools and teachers today. Here are 57 of her quotes:

The task of the educator of young children lies in seeing that the child does not confound good with immobility, and evil with activity.

Maria Montessori

If help and salvation are to come they can only come from the children, for the children are the makers of men.

Maria Montessori

The greatest sign of success for a teacher is to be able to say, "The children are now working as if I did not exist.

Maria Montessori

Establishing lasting peace is the work of education; all politics can do is keep us out of war.

Maria Montessori

To stimulate life, leaving it free, however, to unfold itself, that is the first duty of the educator.

Maria Montessori

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

Freedom without organization of work would be useless. The child left free without means of work would go to waste, just as a new-born baby, if left free without nourishment, would die of starvation. The organization of the work, therefore, is the cornerstone of this new structure of goodness [in education], but even that organization would be in vain without the liberty to make use of it.

Maria Montessori

In the vivid description of the Gospel, it would seem that we must help the Christ hidden in every poor man, in every prisioner, in every sufferer. But if we paraphrased the marvelous scene and applied it to the child, we should find that Christ goes to help all men in the form of the child.

Maria Montessori

The teacher must derive not only the capacity, but the desire, to observe natural phenomena. The teacher must understand and feel her position of observer: the activity must lie in the phenomenon.

Maria Montessori

We teachers can only help the work going on, as servants wait upon a master. We then become witnesses to the development of the human soul; the emergence of the New Man who will no longer be the victim of events but, thanks to his clarity of vision, will become able to direct and to mold the future of mankind.

Maria Montessori

The child is essentially alien to this society of men and might express his position in the words of the Gospel: My kingdom is not of this world.

Maria Montessori

The child is truly a miraculous being, and this should be felt deeply by the educator.

Maria Montessori

We discovered that education is not something which the teacher does, but that it is a natural process which develops spontaneously in the human being.

Maria Montessori

The only language men ever speak perfectly is the one they learn in babyhood, when no one can teach them anything!

Maria Montessori

Rewards and punishments, to speak frankly, are the desk of the soul, that is, a means of enslaving a child's spirit, and better suited to provoke than to prevent deformities.

Maria Montessori

We give the name scientist to the type of man who has felt experiment to be a means guiding him to search out the deep truth of life, to lift a veil from its fascinating secrets, and who, in this pursuit, has felt arising within him a love for the mysteries of nature, so passionate as to annihilate the thought of himself.

Maria Montessori

If education is always to be conceived along the same antiquated lines of a mere transmission of knowledge, there is little to be hoped from it in the bettering of man's future.

Maria Montessori

If an educational act is to be efficacious, it will be only that one which tends to help toward the complete unfolding of life. To be thus helpful it is necessary rigorously to avoid the arrest of spontaneous movements and the imposition of arbitrary tasks.

Maria Montessori

We teachers can only help the work going on, as servants wait upon a master.

Maria Montessori

It is not enough for the teacher to love the child. She must first love and understand the universe. She must prepare herself, and truly work at it.

Maria Montessori

Within the child lies the fate of the future.

Maria Montessori

Of all things love is the most potent.

Maria Montessori