"There are some insects which look like leaves, and others which look like stalks. They pass their lives on leaves and stalks, which they resemble so perfectly as to seem completely one with them. Something like this happens in the child. He absorbs the life going on about him and becomes one with it, just as these insects become one with the vegetation on which they live. The child's impressions are so profound that a biological or psychochemical change takes place, by which his mind ends by resembling the environment itself. Children become like the things they love. In every type of life it has been discovered that this power exists, of absorbing the environment and coming to resemble it."
- Maria Montessori, The Absorbent Mind
- Maria Montessori, The Absorbent Mind