Top 33 Jean Piaget Quotes

Play is the work of childhood.

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.

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.

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.

It is with children that we have the best chance of studying the development of logical knowledge, mathematical knowledge, physical knowledge, and so forth.

I always like to think on a problem before reading about it.

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.

Reflective abstraction, however, is based not on individual actions but on coordinated actions.

Egocentrism appears to us as a form of behavior intermediate between purely individual and socialized behavior.

Logical reasoning is an argument which we have with ourselves and which reproduces internally the features of a real argument.

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.

Logic and mathematics are nothing but specialised linguistic structures.

Knowing reality means constructing systems of transformations that correspond, more or less adequately, to reality.

This means that no single logic is strong enough to support the total construction of human knowledge.

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.

Scientific thought, then, is not momentary; it is not a static instance; it is a process.

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.

The practice of narrative and argument does not lead to invention, but it compels a certain coherence of thought.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Scientific knowledge is in perpetual evolution; it finds itself changed from one day to the next.

Play is the answer to the question, ‘How does anything new come about?’

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.

From the moral as from the intellectual point of view, the child is born neither good nor bad but master of his destiny.

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.

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.

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.

One of the most striking things one finds about the child under 7-8 is his extreme assurance on all subjects.

Childish egocentrism is, in its essence, an inability to differentiate between the ego and the social environment.

In genetic epistemology, as in developmental psychology, too, there is never an absolute beginning.

To reason logically is so to link one’s propositions that each should contain the reason for the one succeeding it, and should itself be demonstrated by the one preceding it. Or at any rate, whatever the order adopted in the construction of one’s own exposition, it is to demonstrate judgments by each other.