Jean Piaget

To understand is to invent.

— Jean Piaget

I could not think without writing.

— Jean Piaget

We learn more when we are compelled to invent.

— Jean Piaget

Play is the answer to how anything new comes about.

— Jean Piaget

Punishment renders autonomy of conscience impossible.

— Jean Piaget

Experience precedes understanding.

— Jean Piaget

Play is the work of childhood.

— Jean Piaget

Reflective abstraction, however, is based not on individual actions but on coordinated actions.

— Jean Piaget

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

— Jean Piaget

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

— Jean Piaget

Only education is capable of saving our societies from possible collapse, whether violent, or gradual.

— Jean Piaget

What we see changes what we know. What we know changes what we see.

— Jean Piaget

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

— Jean Piaget

Children require long, uniterrupted periods of play and exploration

— Jean Piaget

Equilibrium is the profoundest tendency of all human activity.

— Jean Piaget

During the first few months of an infant's life, its manner of taking the breast, of laying its head on the pillow,…

— Jean Piaget

Knowing reality means constructing systems of transformations that correspond, more or less adequately, to reality.

— Jean Piaget

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

— Jean Piaget

I engage my subjects in conversation, patterned after psychiatric questioning, with the aim of discovering something about the reasoning underlying their right…

— Jean Piaget

What is desired is that the teacher ceased being a lecturer, satisfied with transmitting ready-made solutions. His role should rather be that…

— Jean Piaget

During the earliest stages the child perceives things like a solipsist who is unaware of himself as subject and is familiar only…

— Jean Piaget

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

— Jean Piaget

Each time one prematurely teaches a child something he could have discovered himself, that child is kept from inventing it and consequently…

— Jean Piaget

At one time, many philosophers held that faultless "laws of thought" were somehow inherent, a priori, in the very nature of mind.…

— Jean Piaget

The child who defines a lie as being a "naughty word" knows perfectly well that lying consists in not speaking the truth.…

— Jean Piaget

There is little mysticism without an element of transcendence, and conversely, there is no transcendence without a certain degree of egocentrism. It…

— Jean Piaget

With regard to moral rules, the child submits more or less completely in intention to the rules laid down for him, but…

— Jean Piaget

The child often sees only what he already knows. He projects the whole of his verbal thought into things. He sees mountains…

— Jean Piaget

“For someone who constantly comes across this problem in the course of his professional activities, the question whether philosophy has the status…

— Jean Piaget

As far as the game of marbles is concerned, there is therefore no contradiction between the egocentric practice of games and the…

— Jean Piaget

Children's games constitute the most admirable social institutions. The game of marbles, for instance, as played by boys, contains an extremely complex…

— Jean Piaget

“Every observer has noted that the younger the child, the less sense he has of his own ego. From the intellectual point…

— Jean Piaget

Much research in psychology has been more concerned with how large groups of people behave than about the particular ways in which…

— Jean Piaget

For the fundamental fact of human psychology is that society, instead of remaining almost entirely inside the individual organism as in the…

— Jean Piaget

In certain circumstances where he experiments in new types of conduct by cooperating with his equals, the child is already an adult.…

— Jean Piaget

The discussion of the game of marbles seems to have led us into rather deep waters. But in the eyes of children…

— Jean Piaget

The relations between parents and children are certainly not only those of constraint. There is spontaneous mutual affection, which from the first…

— Jean Piaget

Mixture of assimilation to earlier schemas and adaptation to the actual conditions of the situation is what defines motor intelligence. But and…

— Jean Piaget

“I know some very intelligent philosophers, not at all dogmatic, who believe that “science” cannot introduce the concept of finality in the…

— Jean Piaget

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

— Jean Piaget