Charlotte Mason famous quotes

So much for the right books; the right use of them is another matter. The children must enjoy the book. The ideas it holds must each make that sudden, delightful impact upon their minds, must cause that intellectual stir, which mark the inception of an idea.
-- Charlotte Mason

#Children #Book #Impact

The people themselves begin to clamour for an education which shall qualify their children for life rather than for earning a living. As a matter of fact, it is the man who has read and thought on many subjects who is, with the necessary training, the most capable whether in handling tools, drawing plans, or keeping books.
-- Charlotte Mason

#Children #Book #Men

An observant child should be put in the way of things worth observing.
-- Charlotte Mason

#Children #Way #Should

A child gets moral notions from the fairy-tales he delights in, as do his elders from tale and verse.
-- Charlotte Mason

#Children #Delight #Moral

A child is a person in whom all possibilities are present - present now at this very moment - not to be educed after many years and efforts manifold on the part of the educator
-- Charlotte Mason

#Children #Years #Effort

Our aim in education is to give a full life. We owe it to them to initiate an immense number of interests. Life should be all living, and not merely a tedious passing of time; not all doing or all feeling or all thinking - the strain would be too great - but, all living; that is to say, we should be in touch wherever we go, whatever we hear, whatever we see, with some manner of vital interest.
-- Charlotte Mason

#Learning #Thinking #Numbers

Do not let the endless succession of small things crowd great ideals out of sight and out of mind.
-- Charlotte Mason

#Sight #Mind #Crowds

The teacher who allows his scholars the freedom of the city of books is at liberty to be their guide, philosopher and friend; and is no longer the mere instrument of forcible intellectual feeding.
-- Charlotte Mason

#Teacher #Book #Cities

Never be within doors when you can rightly be without.
-- Charlotte Mason

#Doors

Imagination does not stir at the suggestion of the feeble, much diluted stuff that is too often put into childrenÂ’s hands.
-- Charlotte Mason

#Children #Hands #Imagination

We are all meant to be naturalists, each in his own degree, and it is inexcusable to live in a world so full of the marvels of plant and animal life and to care for none of these things.
-- Charlotte Mason

#Animal #Degrees #World

Of all the joyous motives of school life, the love of knowledge is the only abiding one; the only one which determines the scale, so to speak, upon which the person will hereafter live.
-- Charlotte Mason

#Educational #School #Abiding

Authority is just and faithful in all matters of promise-keeping; it is also considerate, and that is why a good mother is the best home-ruler.
-- Charlotte Mason

#Mother #Home #Faithful

To introduce children to literature is to instal them in a very rich and glorious kingdom, to bring a continual holiday to their doors, to lay before them a feast exquisitely served. But they must learn to know literature by being familiar with it from the very first. A child's intercourse must always be with good books, the best that we can find.
-- Charlotte Mason

#Children #Book #Holiday

The most common and the monstrous defect in the education of the day is that children fail to acquire the habit of reading.
-- Charlotte Mason

#Children #Reading #Common

Education is an atmosphere, a discipline, a life
-- Charlotte Mason

#Discipline #Atmosphere

Education, like faith, is the evidence of things not seen.
-- Charlotte Mason

#Evidence

Give your child a single valuable idea, and you have done more for his education than if you had laid upon his mind the burden of bushels of information.
-- Charlotte Mason

#Children #Ideas #Giving

The indwelling of Christ is a thought particularly fit for the children, because their large faith does not stumble at the mystery, their imagination leaps readily to the marvel, that the King Himself should inhabit a little child's heart.
-- Charlotte Mason

#Kings #Children #Heart

Every person exceeds our power of measurement.
-- Charlotte Mason

#Measurement #Persons

We talk of lost ideals, but perhaps they are not lost, only changed; when our ideal for ourselves and for our children becomes limited to prosperity and comfort, we get these, very likely, for ourselves and for them, but we get no more.
-- Charlotte Mason

#Children #Comfort #Prosperity

The children's lessons should provide material for their mental growth, should exercise the several powers of their minds, should furnish them with fruitful ideas, and should afford them knowledge, really valuable for its own sake, accurate, and interesting, of the kind that the child may recall as a man with profit and pleasure.
-- Charlotte Mason

#Children #Exercise #Men

For the mind is capable of dealing with only one kind of food; it lives, grows and is nourished upon ideas only; mere information is to it as a meal of sawdust to the body; there are no organs for the assimilation of the one more than of the other.
-- Charlotte Mason

#Ideas #Mind #Meals

Thought breeds thought; children familiar with great thoughts take as naturally to thinking for themselves as the well-nourished body takes to growing; and we must bear in mind that growth, physical, intellectual, moral, spiritual, is the sole end of education.
-- Charlotte Mason

#Spiritual #Children #Thinking

Of the three sorts of knowledge proper to a child, the knowledge of God, of man, and of the universe,--the knowledge of God ranks first in importance, is indispensable, and most happy-making.
-- Charlotte Mason

#Children #Men #Three

The mother who takes pains to endow her children with good habits secures for herself smooth and easy days.
-- Charlotte Mason

#Mother #Children #Pain

What a child digs for becomes his own possession,
-- Charlotte Mason

#Children #Possession

We attempt to define a person, the most commonplace person we know, but he will not submit to bounds; some unexpected beauty of nature breaks out; we find he is not what we thought, and begin to suspect that every person exceeds our power of measurement.
-- Charlotte Mason

#Measurement #Unexpected #Nature Beauty

Let children have tales of the imagination, scenes laid in other lands and other times; heroic adventures, hairbreadth escapes, delicious fairy tales, even where it is all impossible, and they know it, and yet they believe.
-- Charlotte Mason

#Children #Believe #Adventure

Therefore, teaching, talk and tale, however lucid or fascinating, effect nothing until self-activity be set up; that is, self-education is the only possible education; the rest is mere veneer laid on the surface of a child's nature.
-- Charlotte Mason

#Children #Teaching #Learning

Let children alone... the education of habit is successful in so far as it enables the mother to let her children alone, not teasing them with perpetual commands and directions - a running fire of Do and Don’t ; but letting them go their own way and grow, having first secured that they will go the right way and grow to fruitful purpose.
-- Charlotte Mason

#Mother #Running #Children

There is no education but self-education.
-- Charlotte Mason

#Self #Self Education

None of us can be proof against the influences that proceed from the persons he associates with. Wherefore, in books and men, let us look out for the best society, that which yields a bracing and wholesome influence. We all know the person for whose company we are the better, though the talk is only about fishing or embroidery.
-- Charlotte Mason

#Book #Men #Yield

In this time of extraordinary pressure, educational and social, perhaps a mother’s first duty to her children is to secure for them a quiet and growing time, a full six years of passive receptive life, the waking part of it for the most part spent out in the fresh air.
-- Charlotte Mason

#Mother #Children #Educational

The peculiar value of geography lies in its fitness to nourish the mind with ideas and furnish the imagination with pictures.
-- Charlotte Mason

#Lying #Ideas #Imagination

Education is the science of relations
-- Charlotte Mason

#Relation

Education is a life; that life is sustained on ideas; ideas are of spiritual origin, and that we get them chiefly as we convey them to one another. The duty of parents is to sustain a child's inner life with ideas as they sustain his body with food.
-- Charlotte Mason

#Spiritual #Children #Ideas

Composition is as natural as jumping and running to children who have been allowed due use of books.
-- Charlotte Mason

#Running #Children #Book

Children should transcribe favourite passages. --A certain sense of possession and delight may be added to this exercise if children are allowed to choose for transcription their favorite verse in one poem or another... But a book of their own, made up of their own chosen verses, should give them pleasure.
-- Charlotte Mason

#Children #Book #Exercise

The problem before the educator is to give the child control over his own nature, to enable him to hold himself in hand as much in regard to the traits we call good, as to those we call evil:.
-- Charlotte Mason

#Children #Hands #Evil

We have never been so rich in books. But there has never been a generation when there is so much twaddle in print for children.
-- Charlotte Mason

#Children #Book #Learning