To stimulate life, leaving it free, however, to unfold itself--that is the first duty of the educator. - Maria Montessori
Never help a child with a task at which he feels he can succeed. - Maria Montessori
The task of the educator lies in seeing that the child does not confound good with immobility and evil with activity. - Maria Montessori
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. - Maria Montessori
We teachers can only help the work going on, as servants wait upon a master. - Maria Montessori
I keep pointing at the child; they keep staring at my finger. - 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
Our care of the child should be governed, not by the desire to make him learn things, but by the endeavor always to keep burning within him that light which is called intelligence. - Maria Montessori
The environment acts more strongly upon the individual life the less fixed and strong this individual life may be. - 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
Imagination does not become great until human beings, given the courage and the strength, use it to create. - Maria Montessori
Preventing war is the work of politicians, establishing peace is the work of educationists. - Maria Montessori
Establishing lasting peace is the work of education; all politics can do is keep us out of war. - Maria Montessori