Quotes from Jean Piaget

Every acquisition of accommodation becomes material for assimilation, but assimilation always resists new accommodations.

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.

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.

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

Equilibrium is the profoundest tendency of all human activity.

How much more precious is a little humanity than all the rules in the world.

When you teach a child something you take away forever his chance of discovering it for himself.

Play is the answer to how anything new comes about.

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.

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.

Intelligence is what you use when you don't know what to do.

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

If you want to be creative, stay in part a child, with the creativity and invention that characterizes children before they are deformed by adult society.

To express the same idea in still another way, I think that human knowledge is essentially active.

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

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

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

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

In other words, knowledge of the external world begins with an immediate utilisation of things, whereas knowledge of self is stopped by this purely practical and utilitarian contact.

If only we could know what was going on in a baby's mind while observing him in action we could certainly understand everything there is to psychology.

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.

The current state of knowledge is a moment in history, changing just as rapidly as the state of knowledge in the past has ever changed and, in many instances, more rapidly.

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 principle goal of education is to create men who are capable of doing new things, not simply of repeating what other generations have done - men who are creative, inventive and discoverers.