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Maria Montessori QuotesJune 6, 2008 by Miss Norma | No comments

This is a list of Maria Montessori quotes that I have gathered throughout my research, training, and experience. Each of these quotes has a significant meaning to me and other Montessori educators. There are endless quotes that can be used from Maria Montessori, all of which will eventually be listed here. For that reason, this list will be continuously updated as I come across more quotes from Maria Montessori.

1. “The teacher, when she begins work in our school, must have a kind of faith that the child will reveal himself through work” (Montessori, 1967, 276).

2. “In every exercise when the child has recognized the differences between the qualities of the objects, the teacher fixes the idea of this quality with a word” (Montessori, 1914, pg 124).

3. “In our work, therefore, we have given a name to this part of the mind which is built up with exactitude and we call it the mathematical mind” (Montessori, 1967, 185).

4. “Sometimes I use a word easily misunderstood; the teacher must be seductive, she must entice the children” (Montessori, 1967, 278).

5. “That the mathematical mind is active from the first, becomes apparent not only from the attraction that exactitude exerts on every action the child performs, but we see it also in the fact that the little child’s need for order is one of the most powerful incentives to dominate his early life” (Montessori, 1967, 189,190).

6. “The Teacher, …., must have a kind of faith that the child will reveal himself through work” (Montessori, 1967, 276).

7. “The mind and the hand are prepared separately for written language and follow different roads to the same goal” (Montessori, 1965, pg 128).

8. “By reading I mean the interpretation of an idea by means of graphics or symbols…A child does not read until he receives ideas from the written word” (Montessori, 1983, pg 229).

9. “In brief, writing helps a child’s physiologically and reading helps him socially” (Montessori, 1983, pg 230).

10.“There is in a child a special kind of sensitivity which leads him to absorb everything about him, and it is this work of observing and absorbing that alone enables him to adapt himself to life” (Montessori, 1967, 62).

11.“Two sensations, tactile and muscular, are mixed together, and give rise to that sense which psychologists call the ‘stereognistic’ sense” (Montessori, 1985, 117).

12.“Order is one of the needs of life which, when it is satisfied, produces a real happiness” (Montessori, 1973, 52).

13.“The Child’s mind is not prepared for numbers, by certain preliminary ideas; given in haste by the teacher, but it has been prepared for it by a process of formation, by a slow building up of itself” (Montessori, 1914, 165).

14.“The teacher thus becomes a director of the children’s own spontaneous work. She is silent and passive (Montessori, 1985, 319)

15.“This is the first duty of an educator; stir up life, but leave it free to develop” (Montessori, 1985, 111).

16.“Whoever touches the life of the child, touches the most sensitive point of a whole which has roots in the most distant past and climbs towards the infinite future.”

Montessori, M (1965). The Formation of Man. Adyar, Madras, (India) Theosophical Pub. House

Montessori, M (1973) The Secret of Childhood. Ballantine Books