Maria Montessori Quotes

A healthy social life is found only, when in the mirror of each soul the whole community finds its reflection, and when in the whole community the virtue of each one is living.

The degree to which we connect to a community is in proportion to our individuality.

A merging of two people is an impossibility, and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom and development.

I think when you're 25 you're still finding yourself, and you should have the freedom of that.

Maybe I’m a human, but I’m a me-and-Ma as well.

A man must be in sympathy with society around him, or else, not wish to be in sympathy with it. If neither of these two, he must be wretched.

It's so important to raise people to grow up to be who they are and not be forced to be who they're not. What an awful thing to do to people - it's like being in prison.

If economic progress means that we become anonymous cogs in some great machine, then progress is an empty promise.

I hope one day I will be able to be completely myself. Maybe I'll be wilder.

Remember it's OK to be yourself.

Just keep doing 'you', and being who you are and doing what feels natural to you.

Study hard. Work hard. Play harder. Don't be bound by rules, don't hurt anybody and never ever live somebody else's dream.

If you did not care at all what anyone else thought about you, what would you do differently or change in your life?

But perhaps a man is not required to bury himself.

I try more and more to be myself, caring relatively little whether people approve or disapprove.

Only you know who you were born to be and you need to be free to be that person.

I think you're always policing yourself by trying to do what you think would be "cool" and accepted by other people, until you start to figure out who you really want to be. Growing up is an ongoing push-and-pull of you being yourself and you performing to what society expects you to be.

Peace is not just the absence of mass destruction, but a positive internal and external condition in which people are free so that they can grow to their full potential.

The creation of a more peaceful and happier society has to begin from the level of the individual, and from there it can expand to one's family, to one's neighborhood, to one's community and so on.

I'm just free. And I can express my sensuality. I can express my pain, vulnerability, my strength. All of those things. Because I had a sheltered upbringing doesn't mean I haven't been a woman. I'm a woman that has had life experiences.

When you leave here today and commence the next stage of your life, you can follow someone else's script, try to make choices that will make other people happy, avoid discomfort, do what is expected, and copy the status quo. Or you can look at all that you have accomplished today and use it as fuel to venture forth and write your own story. If you do, amazing things will take shape.

We were all given our opportunities to be ourselves. A little bit of ourselves.

Our individuality is all, all, that we have. There are those who barter it for security, those who repress it for what they believe is the betterment of the whole society, but blessed in the twinkle of the morning star is the one who nurtures it and rides it in, in grace and love and wit, from peculiar station to peculiar station along life's bittersweet route.

Life choices and projects and photo shoots, I can't base them on anybody else but myself. I've done things where I'm like, "Do I want my dad to see this? I don't know!" But the best lesson I can teach my sisters, or any younger women, is "Do what YOU do. Don't follow me, follow you."

If it were felt that the free development of individuality is one of the leading essentials of well-being; that it is not only a coordinate element with all that is designated by the terms civilisation, instruction, education, culture, but is itself a necessary part and condition of all those things; there would be no danger that liberty should be undervalued.