"The essential functions of the mind consist in understanding and in inventing, in other words, in building up structures by structuring reality."
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Quote collection
Jean Piaget quotes (page 3 of 4)
73 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Punishment renders autonomy of conscience impossible."
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"Accommodation of mental structures to reality implies the existence of assimilatory schemata apart from which any structure would be impossible."
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"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."
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"For the fundamental fact of human psychology is that society, instead of remaining almost entirely inside the individual organism as in the case of animals prompted by their instincts, becomes crystallized almost entirely outside the individuals. In other words, social rules, as Durkheim has so powerfully shown, whether they be linguistic, moral, religious, or legal, etc., cannot be constituted, transmitted or preserved by means of an internal biological heredity, but only through the external pressure exercised by individuals upon each other."
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"Knowing reality means constructing systems of transformations that correspond, more or less adequately, to reality."
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"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."
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"It was while teaching philosophy that I saw how easily one can say ... what one wants to say. ... In fact, I became particularly aware if the dangers of speculation ... It's so much easier than digging out the facts. You sit in your office and build a system. But with my training in biology, I felt this kind of undertaking precarious."
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"I could not think without writing."
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"At one time, many philosophers held that faultless "laws of thought" were somehow inherent, a priori, in the very nature of mind. This belief was twice shaken in the past century; first when Russell and his successors showed how the logic men employ can be defective, and later when Freud and Piaget started to reveal the tortuous ways in which our minds actually develop."
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"Reflective abstraction, however, is based not on individual actions but on coordinated actions."
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"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."
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"Scientific knowledge is in perpetual evolution; it finds itself changed from one day to the next."
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"The most developed science remains a continual becoming"
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"If logic itself is created rather than being inborn, it follows that the first task of education is to form reasoning."
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"The majority of parents are poor psychologists and give their children the most questionable moral trainings. It is perhaps in this domain that one realized most how keenly how immoral it can be to believe too much in morality, and how much more precious is a little humanity than all the rules in the world."
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"It is as his own mind comes into contact with others that truth will begin to acquire value in the child's eyes and will consequently become a moral demand that can be made upon him. As long as the child remains egocentric, truth as such will fail to interest him and he will see no harm in transposing facts in accordance with his desires."
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"If a baby really has no awareness of himself and is totally thing-directed and at the same time all his states of mind are projected onto things, our second paradox makes sense: on the one hand, thought in babies can be viewed as pure accommodation or exploratory movements, but on the other this very same thought is only one, long, completely autistic waking dream."
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"If mutual respect does derive from unilateral respect, it does so by opposition."
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"As you know, Bergson pointed out that there is no such thing as disorder but rather two sorts of order, geometric and living."
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