In Memoriam Quotes

“Letters sometimes required thinking over and Miss Mason would say,—“I will give you the answer to that tomorrow”; and tomorrow the answer would be ready without any reminder, and the letter would be answered in detail and without any further reference to its pages. She constantly said,—“Always remember that persons matter more than things. Don’t say anything that will leave a sting.”
― Parents' National Education Union, In Memoriam: A Tribute to Charlotte Mason

“Knowledge is information touched with emotion: feeling must be stirred, imagination must picture, reason must consider, nay, conscience must pronounce on the information we offer before it becomes mind-stuff.”
― Parents' National Education Union, In Memoriam: A Tribute to Charlotte Mason

“That the forming of habits is a great part of education; (b)​that body, mind, soul, and spirit, equally, live upon food, and perish of famine; all four require daily bread; all thrive as they work, and degenerate in idleness.”
― Parents' National Education Union, In Memoriam: A Tribute to Charlotte Mason

“Its “object” was the physical education, the moral training, the mental discipline and instruction, and the spiritual growth, of the child. Its constitution, parents of whatever class, and others interested in education. Its plan of work included arrangements for business meetings, lectures, field excursions, schoolroom and cottage lectures, cottage field excursions, the dissemination of literature, occasional lectures by well-known educationists, an examination scheme, a magazine for the UNION, a training college, and lectures on education under the headings of the ‘Objects.”
― Parents' National Education Union, In Memoriam: A Tribute to Charlotte Mason

“The books are hard. But the more she asked, the more the children gave. And, though they never saw her, there were thousands who loved her, because she understood them and knew what they wanted. She had treated them as persons. She had respected them.”
― Parents' National Education Union, In Memoriam: A Tribute to Charlotte Mason

“Miss Mason’s life was one long struggle against mechanism. She distrusted organisation and standardisation. For this reason, she would have no truck with government departments or municipal control. Again, she set little store by the results of public examinations.”
― Parents' National Education Union, In Memoriam: A Tribute to Charlotte Mason

“Yet she was no bureaucrat; her practice was as various and elastic as her principles were constant; there was the method and even the letter, but above all the spirit.”
― Parents' National Education Union, In Memoriam: A Tribute to Charlotte Mason

“who by her courage and faith brought into the poorest schools of the country and to the most neglected children the opportunity of seeing and feeling and believing in beauty and in truth.”
― Parents' National Education Union, In Memoriam: A Tribute to Charlotte Mason

“For Spirit is stronger than matter and we who know even but a little of Miss Mason’s teaching, know that it rests on eternal truth.”
― Parents' National Education Union, In Memoriam: A Tribute to Charlotte Mason

“no one believed more strongly than she that knowledge is only for those who have the will to labour earnestly for it; it cannot be freely given by anyone.”
― Parents' National Education Union, In Memoriam: A Tribute to Charlotte Mason

“In fact some people who have seized this or that part of her teaching, not knowing whose it was, and have let it run away with them, have lost the balance and saneness which marks Miss Mason’s teaching all through.”
― Parents' National Education Union, In Memoriam: A Tribute to Charlotte Mason

“Frail as she was, Miss Mason had faith to live, not ignoring difficulties, not denying pain, but facing both with courage and with a sure and certain hope that workers, strength, and means would come in so far as the work was ‘the very work God meant for her’ for she loved to say to her ‘Bairns,’ “Thou cam’st not to thy place by accident.”
― Parents' National Education Union, In Memoriam: A Tribute to Charlotte Mason

“Let us remember that the works of men indirectly, and the work of Nature, directly, are the great and marvellous works of God. Thinking of these things, we shall be meek and very ready to learn, and so we shall find out that ‘the meek shall inherit the earth,’ for those things that we love and delight in are far more truly ours than the things so easily spoilt, which money can buy.”
― Parents' National Education Union, In Memoriam: A Tribute to Charlotte Mason

“But we have to reconsider our whole approach to the history of the past—have we so taught it through ‘Drum and Trumpet’ that the warrior and not the law-giver, the destroyer and not the constructor, has been the arch type of mankind in the eyes of our boys and girls?”
― Parents' National Education Union, In Memoriam: A Tribute to Charlotte Mason

“The way in which Miss Mason started the college was the way in which she did everything:—she did not wait for funds; she knew the thing had to be done so she did it.”
― Parents' National Education Union, In Memoriam: A Tribute to Charlotte Mason

“Among those liberties which we in this UNION claim for the child, due to him as a person, is freedom of thought, the function of right thinking,—the importance of which cannot be exaggerated. This is an article in his Bill of Rights which we should be most careful to safeguard and to establish for the child. All those who teach know how difficult it is not to violate this right. It is so easy to impose opinion, and so to create prejudice unless a careful watch be kept.”
― Parents' National Education Union, In Memoriam: A Tribute to Charlotte Mason

“If parents take no heed of the great thoughts which move their age, they cannot expect to retain influence over the minds of their children.”
― Parents' National Education Union, In Memoriam: A Tribute to Charlotte Mason

“We remember Miss Mason because she taught us to regard the children as “perfect but immature”; that their minds were each an indivisible whole, with the dignity of a personality we must not outrage. She saved us from the growing belief that man might be greater than his Maker.”
― Parents' National Education Union, In Memoriam: A Tribute to Charlotte Mason

“When she talked with you she brought out the best that was in you, something that you did not know was there.”
― Parents' National Education Union, In Memoriam: A Tribute to Charlotte Mason

“Miss Mason had a genius for education. She had an inbred good sense and an unfatigued sensibility. Her mind was tempered by great literature. She loved the humanities. She had a very distinguished gift of leadership in cooperation. There was a tenderness, a humility in her self-confidence which recalled Vauvenargues’ saying that ‘great thoughts come from the heart.”
― Parents' National Education Union, In Memoriam: A Tribute to Charlotte Mason