"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."

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

"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."

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

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

"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. For what is the use of transmitting knowledge if the individual's total development lags behind?"

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

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

"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.""

"To aid life, leaving it free, however, that is the basic task of the educator."

“The child has other powers than ours, and the creation he achieves is no small one; it is everything.“

“If the idea of the universe is presented to the child in the right way, it will do more for him than just arouse his interest, for it will create in him admiration and wonder, a feeling loftier than any interest and more satisfying.”

“The essence of independence is to be able to do something for one’s self. Adults work to finish a task, but the child works in order to grow, and is working to create the adult, the person that is to be. Such experience is not just play... it is work he must do in order to grow up.”

“Children become like the things they love.”

“Life makes itself manifest,-life creates, life gives:-and is in its turn held within certain limits and bound by certain laws which are insuperable.” The Montessori Method, chapter 4

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