Maria Montessori

“To confer the gift of drawing, we must create an eye that sees, a hand that obeys, a soul that feels; and in this task, the whole life must cooperate. In this sense, life itself is the only preparation for drawing. Once we have lived, the inner spark of vision does the rest.”

“If education is protection to life, you will realize that it is necessary that education accompany life during its whole course.”

“The child, merely by going on with his life, learns to speak the language belonging to his race. It is like a mental chemistry that takes place in the child.”

“The hand is, in the highest degree, a human characteristic. It is man's organ of grasp and of the sense of touch, while in animals these two functions are relegated to the mouth.”

“Dependence is not patriotism. A man does not love his mother if he hangs about her to the point of burdening her with a weak, feckless son.”

“When you have solved the problem of controlling the attention of the child, you have solved the entire problem of its education.”

“It would be so simple to allow children, when tired of sitting, to rise, and when tired of writing, to desist, and then their bones would not be twisted.”

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

“The first idea the child must acquire is that of the difference between good and evil.”

“The respect and protection of woman and of maternity should be raised to the position of an inalienable social duty and should become one of the principles of human morality.”

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

“There can be no 'graduated exercises in drawing' leading up to an artistic creation. That goal can be attained only through the development of mechanical technique and through the freedom of the spirit.”

“I have for many years interested myself in the study of children from three years upwards. Many have urged me to continue my studies on the same lines with older children. But what I have felt to be most vital is the need for more careful and particularized study of the tiny child.”

“If the whole of mankind is to be united into one brotherhood, all obstacles must be removed so that men, all over the surface of the globe, should be as children playing in a garden.”

“The selfsame procedure which zoology, a branch of the natural sciences, applies to the study of animals, anthropology must apply to the study of man; and by doing so, it enrolls itself as a science in the field of nature.”

“Through machinery, man can exert tremendous powers almost as fantastic as if he were the hero of a fairy tale. Through machinery, man can travel with an ever increasing velocity; he can fly through the air and go beneath the surface of the ocean.”

“The chief symptom of adolescence is a state of expectation, a tendency towards creative work, and a need for the strengthening of self-confidence. Suddenly, the child becomes very sensitive to the rudeness and humiliations which he had previously suffered with patient indifference.”

“Now, what really makes a teacher is love for the human child; for it is love that transforms the social duty of the educator into the higher consciousness of a mission.”

“We await the successsive births in the soul of the child. We give all possible material, that nothing may lack to the groping soul, and then we watch for the perfect faculty to come, safeguarding the child from interruption so that it may carry its efforts through.”

“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.”