Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
To understand is to invent.
Play is the work of childhood.
Experience precedes understanding.
I could not think without writing.
We learn more when we are compelled to invent.
Play is the answer to how anything new comes about.
Punishment renders autonomy of conscience impossible.
The most developed science remains a continual becoming
I always like to think on a problem before reading about it.
Intelligence is what you use when you don't know what to do.
Equilibrium is the profoundest tendency of all human activity.
Children require long, uniterrupted periods of play and exploration
What we see changes what we know. What we know changes what we see.
Teaching means creating situations where structures can be discovered.
Play is the answer to the question, 'How does anything new come about?'
Logic and mathematics are nothing but specialised linguistic structures.
How much more precious is a little humanity than all the rules in the world.
Everytime we teach a child something, we prevent him from inventing it himself.
If mutual respect does derive from unilateral respect, it does so by opposition.
Scientific thought, then, is not momentary; it is not a static instance; it is a process.
Reflective abstraction, however, is based not on individual actions but on coordinated actions.
When you teach a child something you take away forever his chance of discovering it for himself.
Scientific knowledge is in perpetual evolution; it finds itself changed from one day to the next.
To express the same idea in still another way, I think that human knowledge is essentially active.
In genetic epistemology, as in developmental psychology, too, there is never an absolute beginning.
Only education is capable of saving our societies from possible collapse, whether violent, or gradual.
This means that no single logic is strong enough to support the total construction of human knowledge.
One of the most striking things one finds about the child under 7-8 is his extreme assurance on all subjects.
Logical activity is not the whole of intelligence. One can be intelligent without being particularly logical.
Egocentrism appears to us as a form of behavior intermediate between purely individual and socialized behavior.
I have always detested any departure from reality, an attitude which I relate to my mother's poor mental health.
The practice of narrative and argument does not lead to invention, but it compels a certain coherence of thought.
Moral autonomy appears when the mind regards as necessary an ideal that is independent of all external pressures.
Childish egocentrism is, in its essence, an inability to differentiate between the ego and the social environment.
Knowing reality means constructing systems of transformations that correspond, more or less adequately, to reality.
During the earliest stages of thought, accommodation remains on the surface of physical as well as social experience.
If logic itself is created rather than being inborn, it follows that the first task of education is to form reasoning.
From the moral as from the intellectual point of view, the child is born neither good nor bad but master of his destiny.
Every acquisition of accommodation becomes material for assimilation, but assimilation always resists new accommodations.
How can we, with our adult minds, know what will be interesting? If you follow the child...you can find out something new.
As you know, Bergson pointed out that there is no such thing as disorder but rather two sorts of order, geometric and living.
Logical reasoning is an argument which we have with ourselves and which reproduces internally the features of a real argument.
Intelligence is what you use when you don't know what to do: when neither innateness nor learning has prepared you for the particular situation.
The essential functions of the mind consist in understanding and in inventing, in other words, in building up structures by structuring reality.
Accommodation of mental structures to reality implies the existence of assimilatory schemata apart from which any structure would be impossible.
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.
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.
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.
It is with children that we have the best chance of studying the development of logical knowledge, mathematical knowledge, physical knowledge, and so forth.
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.