1. Play is the work of childhood.
Jean Piaget
2. 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.
Jean Piaget
3. Play is the answer to the question, ‘How does anything new come about?’
Jean Piaget
4. Logic and mathematics are nothing but specialised linguistic structures.
Jean Piaget
5. 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.
Jean Piaget
6. Every acquisition of accommodation becomes material for assimilation, but assimilation always resists new accommodations.
Jean Piaget
7. Childish egocentrism is, in its essence, an inability to differentiate between the ego and the social environment.
Jean Piaget
8. It is with children that we have the best chance of studying the development of logical knowledge, mathematical knowledge, physical knowledge, and so forth.
Jean Piaget
9. To express the same idea in still another way, I think that human knowledge is essentially active.
Jean Piaget
10. When you teach a child something you take away forever his chance of discovering it for himself.
Jean Piaget
11. The practice of narrative and argument does not lead to invention, but it compels a certain coherence of thought.
Jean Piaget
12. 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.
Jean Piaget
13. 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.
Jean Piaget
14. The most developed science remains a continual becoming.
Jean Piaget
15. Egocentrism appears to us as a form of behavior intermediate between purely individual and socialized behavior.
Jean Piaget
16. 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.
Jean Piaget
17. 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.
Jean Piaget
18. Logical activity is not the whole of intelligence. One can be intelligent without being particularly logical.
Jean Piaget
19. Scientific knowledge is in perpetual evolution; it finds itself changed from one day to the next.
Jean Piaget
20. I always like to think on a problem before reading about it.
Jean Piaget
21. I have always detested any departure from reality, an attitude which I relate to my mother’s poor mental health.
Jean Piaget
22. 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.
Jean Piaget
23. 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.
Jean Piaget
24. 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.
Jean Piaget
25. 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.
Jean Piaget
26. 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.
Jean Piaget
27. 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. Jean Piaget
Jean Piaget
28. Logical reasoning is an argument which we have with ourselves and which reproduces internally the features of a real argument.
Jean Piaget
29. Experience precedes understanding.”
Jean Piaget
30. Intelligence is what you use when you don’t know what to do.
Jean Piaget
31. Every acquisition of accommodation becomes material for assimilation, but assimilation always resists new accommodations.
Jean Piaget
32. Every acquisition of accommodation becomes material for assimilation, but assimilation always resists new accommodations.
Jean Piaget
33. Punishment renders autonomy of conscience impossible.
Jean Piaget
34. The child perceives things like a solipsist who is unaware of himself as subject and is familiar only with his own actions.
Jean Piaget
35. Nel, after throwing a stone onto a sloping bank watching the stone rolling said, ‘Look at the stone. It’s afraid of the grass.’
Jean Piaget
36. While a certain agreement may be reached in the course of one game, ideas about the rules, in general, are still rather vague.
Jean Piaget
37. 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.
Jean Piaget
38. Scientific thought, then, is not momentary; it is not a static instance; it is a process.
Jean Piaget
39. Scientific thought, then, is not momentary; it is not a static instance; it is a process.
Jean Piaget
40. Reflective abstraction, however, is based not on individual actions but on coordinated actions.
Jean Piaget
41. The goal of education is not to increase the amount of knowledge but to create the possibilities for a child to invent and discover.
Jean Piaget
42. Only education is capable of saving our societies from possible collapse, whether violent or gradual.
Jean Piaget
43. Knowledge is not predetermined by heredity.
Jean Piaget
44. Children have real understanding only of that which they invent themselves.
Jean Piaget
45. 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.
Jean Piaget
46. Each time one prematurely teaches a child something he could have discovered himself, that child is kept from inventing it and consequently from understanding it completely.
Jean Piaget
47. This means that no single logic is strong enough to support the total construction of human knowledge.
Jean Piaget
48. We learn more when we are compelled to invent.
Jean Piaget
49. Children require long, uninterrupted periods of play and exploration.
Jean Piaget
50. The child is a realist in every domain of thought.
Jean Piaget
51. Play is the answer to how anything new comes about.
Jean Piaget
52. What the genetic epistemology proposes is discovering the roots of the different varieties of knowledge, since its elementary forms, following to the next levels, including also the scientific knowledge.
Jean Piaget
53. What we see changes what we know. What we know changes what we see.
Jean Piaget
54. Teaching means creating situations where structures can be discovered.
Jean Piaget
55. The spirit of the command having failed to be assimilated, the letter alone remains.
Jean Piaget
56. When the child imitates the rules practiced by his older companions, he feels that he is submitting to an unalterable law.
Jean Piaget
57. True interest appears when the self identifies itself with ideas or objects when it finds in them a means of expression and they become a necessary form of fuel for its activity.
Jean Piaget
58. Before playing with his equals, the child is influenced by his parents.
Jean Piaget
59. Intelligence, the most plastic and at the same time the most durable structural equilibrium of behavior, is essentially a system of living and acting operations.
Jean Piaget
60. Childish egocentrism is, in its essence, an inability to differentiate between the ego and the social environment.
Jean Piaget
61. To perceive is to construct intellectually.
Jean Piaget
62. If mutual respect does derive from unilateral respect, it does so by the opposition.
Jean Piaget
63. Knowing reality means constructing systems of transformations that correspond to reality.
Jean Piaget