Jean Piaget quotes

Jean Piaget was a Swiss psychologist renowned for his pioneering work in child development. His theory of cognitive development profoundly influenced education and our understanding of how children learn. He remains one of the most influential figures in developmental psychology. Here are 125 of his quotes:

If mutual respect does derive from unilateral respect, it does so by opposition. (Jean Piaget)
Every acquisition of accommodation becomes material for assimilation, but assimilation always resists new accommodations. View quote
Jean Piaget
What we see changes what we know. What we know changes what we see. View quote
Jean Piaget
Play is the answer to how anything new comes about. View quote
Jean Piaget
Knowing reality means constructing systems of transformations that correspond, more or less adequately, to reality. View quote
Jean Piaget
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. View quote
Jean Piaget
It is with children that we have the best chance of studying the development of logical knowledge, mathematical knowledge, physical knowledge, and so forth. View quote
Jean Piaget
During the earliest stages the child perceives things like a solipsist who is unaware of himself as subject and is familiar only with his own actions. View quote
Jean Piaget
This means that no single logic is strong enough to support the total construction of human knowledge. View quote
Jean Piaget
Before games are played in common, no rules in the proper sense can come into existence. Regularities and ritualized schemas are already there, but these rites, being the work of the individual, cannot call forth that submission to something superior to the self which characterizes the appearance of any rule. View quote
Jean Piaget
The child who defines a lie as being a "naughty word" knows perfectly well that lying consists in not speaking the truth. He is not, therefore, mistaking one thing for another, he is simply identifying them one with another by what seems to us a quaint extension of the word "lie." (Jean Piaget)
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. View quote
Jean Piaget
The essential functions of the mind consist in understanding and in inventing, in other words, in building up structures by structuring reality. View quote
Jean Piaget
Education, for most people, means trying to lead the child to resemble the typical adult of his society... But for me, education means making creators... You have to make inventors, innovators, not conformists. View quote
Jean Piaget
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. View quote
Jean Piaget
I am convinced that there is no sort of boundary between the living and the mental or between the biological and the psychological. From the moment an organism takes account of a previous experience and adapts to a new situation, that very much resembles psychology. View quote
Jean Piaget
The need to speak the truth and even to seek it for oneself is only conceivable in so far as the individual thinks and acts as one of a society, and not of any society (for it is just the constraining relations between superior and inferior that often drive the latter to prevarication) but of a society founded on reciprocity and mutual respect, and therefore on cooperation. View quote
Jean Piaget
As far as the game of marbles is concerned, there is therefore no contradiction between the egocentric practice of games and the mystical respect entertained for rules. This respect is the mark of a mentality fashioned, not by free cooperation between equals, but by adult constraint. View quote
Jean Piaget
Scientific thought, then, is not momentary; it is not a static instance; it is a process. View quote
Jean Piaget
Play is the work of childhood. View quote
Jean Piaget
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)
The principal 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 discovers. The second goal of education is to form minds which can be critical, can verify, and not accept everything they are offered. View quote
Jean Piaget
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. View quote
Jean Piaget
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. View quote
Jean Piaget
Intelligence is what you use when you don't know what to do. View quote
Jean Piaget