Vygotsky's Quotes

#1. Internal and external action are inseparable: imagination, interpretation, and will are internal processes in external action.

Lev S. Vygotsky

#2. Any human act that gives rise to something new is referred to as a creative act, regardless of whether what is created is a physical object or some mental or emotional construct that lives within the person who created it and is known only to him.

Lev S. Vygotsky

#3. People with great passions, people who accomplish great deeds, people who possess strong feelings, even people with great minds and a strong personality, rarely come out of good little boys and girls.

Lev S. Vygotsky

#4. Through others we become ourselves.

Lev S. Vygotsky

#5. Language is the tool of the tools

Lev S. Vygotsky

#6. Psychology teaches us at every step that though two types of activity can have the same external manifestation, whether in origin or essence, their nature may differ most profoundly.

Lev S. Vygotsky

#7. Thought is not merely expressed in words, it comes into existence through them

Lev S. Vygotsky

#8. What a child can do today with assistance, she will be able to do by herself tomorrow.

Lev S. Vygotsky

#9. The teacher must adopt the role of facilitator not content provider.

Lev S. Vygotsky

#10. Experience teaches us that thought does not express itself in words, but rather realizes itself in them

Lev S. Vygotsky

#11. The true direction of the development of thinking is not from the individual to the social, but from the social to the individual.

Lev S. Vygotsky

#12. The distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers

Lev S. Vygotsky

#13. A word devoid of thought is a dead thing, and a thought unembodied in words remains a shadow.

Lev S. Vygotsky

#14. It is through others that we become ourselves.

Lev S. Vygotsky

#15. What a child can do in cooperation today, he can do alone tomorrow.

Lev Vygotsky

#16. What children can do with the assistance of others might be in some sense even more indicative of their mental development than what they can do alone

Lev S. Vygotsky

#17. The only 'good' learning is that which is in advance of development.

Lev S. Vygotsky

#18. There is reason to believe that voluntary activity, more than highly developed intellect, distinguishes humans from the animals which stand closest to them.

Lev S. Vygotsky

#19. Writing should be meaningful for children, Y an intrinsic need should be aroused in them, and Y writing should be incorporated into a task that is necessary and relevant.

Lev S. Vygotsky

#20. A mind cannot be independent of culture.

Lev Vygotsky

#21. In play, a child is always above his average age, above his daily behavior; in play, it is as though he were a head taller than himself.

Lev Vygotsky

#22. Lev Vygotsky, the great Russian psychologist, used to speak of "thinking in pure meanings." I cannot decide whether this is nonsense or profound truth - it is the sort of reef I end up on when I think about thinking.

Oliver Sacks

#23. The child begins to perceive the world not only through his [or her] eyes but also through his [or her] speech

Lev S. Vygotsky

#24. Human learning presupposes a specific social nature and a process by which children grow into the intellectual life of those around them

Lev S. Vygotsky

#25. The specifically human capacity for language enables children to provide for auxiliary tools in the solution of difficult tasks, to overcome impulsive action, to plan a solution to a problem prior to its execution, and to master their own behavior.

Lev S. Vygotsky

#26. The most significant moment in the course of intellectual development, which gives birth to the purely human forms of practical and abstract intelligence, occurs when speech and practical activity, two previously completely independent lines of development, converge.

Lev Vygotsky

#27. By giving our students practice in talking with others, we give them frames for thinking on their own.

Lev S. Vygotsky

#28. Somehow our society has formed a one-sided view of the human personality, and for some reason everyone understood giftedness and talent only as it applied to the intellect. But it is possible not only to be talented in one's thoughts but also to be talented in one's feelings as well.

Lev Vygotsky

#29. It may be said that the basic characteristic of human behavior in general is that humans personally influence their relations with the environment and through that environment personally change their behavior, subjugating it to their control.

Lev S. Vygotsky

#30. Play continually creates demands on the child to act against immediate impulse, i.e., to act according to the line of greatest resistance.

Lev S. Vygotsky

#31. A child's greatest achievements are possible in play, achievements that tomorrow will become her basic level of real action.

Lev Vygotsky

#32. Pedagogy must be oriented not to the yesterday, but to the tomorrow of the child's development. Only then can it call to life in the process of education those processes of development which now lie in the zone of proximal development

Lev S. Vygotsky

#33. Love can reach the same level of talent, and even genius, as the discovery of differential calculus.

Lev Vygotsky

#34. Learning is more than the acquisition of the ability to think; it is the acquisition of many specialized abilities for thinking about a variety of things.

Lev S. Vygotsky