Top 79 Jean Piaget Quotes
#1. What we see changes what we know. What we know changes what we see.
Jean Piaget
#2. The main functions of intelligence, that of inventing solutions and that of verifying them, do not necessarily involve one another. The first partakes of imagination; the second alone is properly logical.
Jean Piaget
#3. If mutual respect does derive from unilateral respect, it does so by opposition.
Jean Piaget
#4. Intelligence is what you use when you don't know what to do.
Jean Piaget
#5. Knowing reality means constructing systems of transformations that correspond, more or less adequately, to reality.
Jean Piaget
#6. Childish egocentrism is, in its essence, an inability to differentiate between the ego and the social environment.
Jean Piaget
#7. The practice of narrative and argument does not lead to invention, but it compels a certain coherence of thought.
Jean Piaget
#8. As far as the game of marbles is concerned, there is therefore no contradiction between the egocentric practice of games and the mystical respect entertained for rules. This respect is the mark of a mentality fashioned, not by free cooperation between equals, but by adult constraint.
Jean Piaget
#9. Equilibrium is the profoundest tendency of all human activity.
Jean Piaget
#10. From this time on, the universe is built up into an aggregate of permanent objects connected by causal relations that are independent of the subject and are placed in objective space and time.
Jean Piaget
#11. Our problem, from the point of view of psychology and from the point of view of genetic epistemology, is to explain how the transition is made from a lower level of knowledge to a level that is judged to be higher.
Jean Piaget
#12. In other words, knowledge of the external world begins with an immediate utilisation of things, whereas knowledge of self is stopped by this purely practical and utilitarian contact.
Jean Piaget
#13. I engage my subjects in conversation, patterned after psychiatric questioning, with the aim of discovering something about the reasoning underlying their right but especially their wrong answers.
Jean Piaget
#14. To accustom the infant to get out of its own difficulties or to calm it by rocking it may be to lay the foundations of a good or of a bad disposition.
Jean Piaget
#15. True interest appears when the self identifies itself with ideas or objects, when it finds in them a means of expression and they become a necessary form of fuel for its activity.
Jean Piaget
#16. Play is the answer to how anything new comes about.
Jean Piaget
#17. Chance ... in the accommodation peculiar to sensorimotor intelligence, plays the same role as in scientific discovery. It is only useful to the genius and its revelations remain meaningless to the unskilled.
Jean Piaget
#18. Logical reasoning is an argument which we have with ourselves and which reproduces internally the features of a real argument.
Jean Piaget
#19. Every psychological explanation comes sooner or later to lean either on biology or on logic (or on sociology, but this in turn leads to the same alternatives).
Jean Piaget
#20. Before playing with his equals, the child is influenced by his parents. He is subjected from his cradle to a multiplicity of regulations, and even before language he becomes conscious of certain obligations.
Jean Piaget
#21. The more we try to improve our schools, the heavier the teaching task becomes; and the better our teaching methods the more difficult they are to apply.
Jean Piaget
#22. During the first few months of an infant's life, its manner of taking the breast, of laying its head on the pillow, etc., becomes crystallized into imperative habits. This is why education must begin in the cradle.
Jean Piaget
#23. The more the schemata are differentiated, the smaller the gap between the new and the familiar becomes, so that novelty, instead of constituting an annoyance avoided by the subject, becomes a problem and invites searching.
Jean Piaget
#24. On the one hand, there are individual actions such as throwing, pushing, touching, rubbing. It is these individual actions that give rise most of the time to abstraction from objects.
Jean Piaget
#25. The goal of education is not to increase the amount of knowledge but to create the possibilities for a child to invent and discover, to create men who are capable of doing new things.
Jean Piaget
#26. Are we forming children who are only capable of learning what is already known? Or should we try to develop creative and innovative minds, capable of discovery from the preschool age on, throughout life?
Jean Piaget
#27. Punishment renders autonomy of conscience impossible.
Jean Piaget
#28. When you teach a child something you take away forever his chance of discovering it for himself.
Jean Piaget
#29. This means that no single logic is strong enough to support the total construction of human knowledge.
Jean Piaget
#30. I always like to think on a problem before reading about it.
Jean Piaget
#31. One of the most striking things one finds about the child under 7-8 is his extreme assurance on all subjects.
Jean Piaget
#33. With regard to moral rules, the child submits more or less completely in intention to the rules laid down for him, but these, remaining, as it were, external to the subject's conscience, do not really transform his conduct.
Jean Piaget
#34. It is with children that we have the best chance of studying the development of logical knowledge, mathematical knowledge, physical knowledge, and so forth.
Jean Piaget
#35. Teaching means creating situations where structures can be discovered.
Jean Piaget
#36. We learn more when we are compelled to invent.
Jean Piaget
#37. All morality consists in a system of rules, and the essence of all morality is to be sought for in the respect which the individual acquires for these rules.
Jean Piaget
#38. The first type of abstraction from objects I shall refer to as simple abstraction, but the second type I shall call reflective abstraction, using this term in a double sense.
Jean Piaget
#39. The current state of knowledge is a moment in history, changing just as rapidly as the state of knowledge in the past has ever changed and, in many instances, more rapidly.
Jean Piaget
#40. I am convinced that there is no sort of boundary between the living and the mental or between the biological and the psychological. From the moment an organism takes account of a previous experience and adapts to a new situation, that very much resembles psychology.
Jean Piaget
#41. As you know, Bergson pointed out that there is no such thing as disorder but rather two sorts of order, geometric and living.
Jean Piaget
#42. How can we, with our adult minds, know what will be interesting? If you follow the child ... you can find out something new ...
Jean Piaget
#43. From the moral as from the intellectual point of view, the child is born neither good nor bad but master of his destiny.
Jean Piaget
#45. Each time one prematurely teaches a child something he could have discovered himself, that child is kept from inventing it and consequently from understanding it completely.
Jean Piaget
#46. Knowledge is not predetermined by heredity; it is not predetermined in the things around us - in knowing things around him the subject always adds to them.
Jean Piaget
#47. The self thus becomes aware of itself, at least in its practical action, and discovers itself as a cause among other causes and as an object subject to the same laws as other objects.
Jean Piaget
#48. Egocentrism appears to us as a form of behavior intermediate between purely individual and socialized behavior.
Jean Piaget
#49. What is desired is that the teacher ceased being a lecturer, satisfied with transmitting ready-made solutions. His role should rather be that of a mentor stimulating initiative and research.
Jean Piaget
#50. The child of three or four is saturated with adult rules. His universe is dominated by the idea that things are as they ought to be, that everyone's actions conform to laws that are both physical and moral - in a word, that there is a Universal Order.
Jean Piaget
#51. Logical activity is not the whole of intelligence. One can be intelligent without being particularly logical.
Jean Piaget
#52. During the earliest stages of thought, accommodation remains on the surface of physical as well as social experience.
Jean Piaget
#53. Children require long, uniterrupted periods of play and exploration
Jean Piaget
#54. The essential functions of the mind consist in understanding and in inventing, in other words, in building up structures by structuring reality.
Jean Piaget
#55. If logic itself is created rather than being inborn, it follows that the first task of education is to form reasoning.
Jean Piaget
#56. Reflective abstraction, however, is based not on individual actions but on coordinated actions.
Jean Piaget
#57. Scientific knowledge is in perpetual evolution; it finds itself changed from one day to the next.
Jean Piaget
#58. To express the same idea in still another way, I think that human knowledge is essentially active.
Jean Piaget
#59. Everyone knows that at the age of 11-12, children have a marked impulse to form themselves into groups and that the respect paid to the rules and regulations of their play constitutes an important feature of this social life.
Jean Piaget
#60. The child often sees only what he already knows. He projects the whole of his verbal thought into things. He sees mountains as built by men, rivers as dug out with spades, the sun and moon as following us on our walks.
Jean Piaget
#61. Logic and mathematics are nothing but specialised linguistic structures.
Jean Piaget
#62. Scientific thought, then, is not momentary; it is not a static instance; it is a process.
Jean Piaget
#63. Children have real understanding only of that which they invent themselves, and each time that we try to teach them too quickly, we keep them from reinventing it themselves.
Jean Piaget
#65. Logical positivists have never taken psychology into account in their epistemology, but they affirm that logical beings and mathematical beings are nothing but linguistic structures.
Jean Piaget
#66. Every time we teach a child something, we keep him from inventing it himself. On the other hand, that which we allow him to discover for himself will remain with him visible for the rest of his life.
Jean Piaget
#67. In genetic epistemology, as in developmental psychology, too, there is never an absolute beginning.
Jean Piaget
#68. Every acquisition of accommodation becomes material for assimilation, but assimilation always resists new accommodations.
Jean Piaget
#69. Children's games constitute the most admirable social institutions. The game of marbles, for instance, as played by boys, contains an extremely complex system of rules - that is to say, a code of laws, a jurisprudence of its own.
Jean Piaget
#70. The child is a realist in every domain of thought, and it is therefore natural that in the moral sphere he should lay more stress on the external, tangible element than on the hidden motive.
Jean Piaget
#71. I have always detested any departure from reality, an attitude which I relate to my mother's poor mental health.
Jean Piaget
#72. Education, for most people, means trying to lead the child to resemble the typical adult of his society ... but for me and no one else, education means making creators ... You have to make inventors, innovators ... not conformists
Jean Piaget
#73. During the earliest stages the child perceives things like a solipsist who is unaware of himself as subject and is familiar only with his own actions.
Jean Piaget
#74. How much more precious is a little humanity than all the rules in the world.
Jean Piaget
#75. Accommodation of mental structures to reality implies the existence of assimilatory schemata apart from which any structure would be impossible.
Jean Piaget
#76. Play is the answer to the question, 'How does anything new come about?'
Jean Piaget
#77. The most developed science remains a continual becoming
Jean Piaget
#78. What the genetic epistemology proposes is discovering the roots of the different varieties of knowledge, since its elementary forms, following to the next levels, including also the scientific knowledge.
Jean Piaget
#79. Moral autonomy appears when the mind regards as necessary an ideal that is independent of all external pressures.
Jean Piaget
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