Jean Piaget

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

“I have always detested any departure from reality, an attitude which I relate to my mother's poor mental health.”

“The principle goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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 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.”

“I could not think without writing.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“Logical activity is not the whole of intelligence. One can be intelligent without being particularly logical.”

“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.”

“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.”