Character formation cannot be taught. It comes from experience and not from explanation.

The most important period of life is not the age of university studies, but the first one, the period from birth to the age of six.

Let us treat them [children], therefore, with all the kindness which we would wish to help to develop in them.

The child will reveal himself through work.

It is easy to substitute our will for that of the child by means of suggestion or coercion; but when we have done this we have robbed him of his greatest right, the right to construct his own personality.

A vital force is active in every individual and leads it towards its own evolution.

How can we speak of Democracy or Freedom when from the very beginning of life we mould the child to undergo tyranny, to obey a dictator? How can we expect democracy when we have reared slaves? Real freedom begins at the beginning of life, not at the adult stage. These people who have been diminished in their powers, made short-sighted, devitalized by mental fatigue, whose bodies have become distorted, whose wills have been broken by elders who say: "your will must disappear and mine prevail!"-how can we expect them, when school-life is finished, to accept and use the rights of freedom?