A child needs freedom within limits.
A child is mysterious and powerful; And contains within himself the secret of human nature.
It is necessary for the teacher to guide the child without letting him feel her presence too much, so that she may always be ready to supply the desired help, but may never be the obstacle between the child and his experience.
Respect all the reasonable forms of activity in which the child engages and try to understand them.
He does it with his hands, by experience, first in play and then through work. The hands are the instruments of man’s intelligence.
When the child goes out, it is the world itself that offers itself to him. Let us take the child out to show him real things instead of making objects which represent ideas and closing them up in cupboards.
As soon as children find something that interests them they lose their instability and learn to concentrate.
Character formation cannot be taught. It comes from experience and not from explanation.
The development of the individual can be described as a succession of new births at consecutively higher levels.
To let the child do as he likes when he has not yet developed any powers of control is to betray the idea of freedom.
No one can be free unless he is independent.
It is almost possible to say that there is a mathematical relationship between the beauty of his surroundings and the activity of the child; he will make discoveries rather more voluntarily in a gracious setting than in an ugly one.
If help and salvation are to come, they can only come from the children, for the children are the makers of men.
No one who has ever done anything really great or successful has ever done it simply because he was attracted by what we call a ‘reward’ or by the fear of what we call a ‘punishment.’
What advice can we give to new mothers? Their children need to work at an interesting occupation: they should not be helped unnecessarily, nor interrupted, once they have begun to do something intelligent.
Childhood constitutes the most important element in an adult’s life, for it is in his early years that a man is made.
The child is the spiritual builder of mankind, and obstacles to his free development are the stones in the wall by which the soul of man has become imprisoned.
The development of the child during the first three years after birth is unequaled in intensity and importance by any period that precedes or follows in the whole life of the child.
We especially need imagination in science. It is not all mathematics, nor all logic, but it is somewhat beauty and poetry.
Great tact and delicacy is necessary for the care of the mind of a child from three to six years, and an adult can have very little of it.