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All Quotes by author - Jean Piaget

" 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. "

" Before playing with his equals, the child is influenced by his parents. He is subjected from his cradle to a multiplicity of regulations, and even before language he becomes conscious of certain obligations. "

" Childish egocentrism is, in its essence, an inability to differentiate between the ego and the social environment. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Egocentrism appears to us as a form of behavior intermediate between purely individual and socialized behavior. "

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

" 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. "

" From the moral as from the intellectual point of view, the child is born neither good nor bad but master of his destiny. "

" From this time on, the universe is built up into an aggregate of permanent objects connected by causal relations that are independent of the subject and are placed in objective space and time. "

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

" 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. "

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

" In genetic epistemology, as in developmental psychology, too, there is never an absolute beginning. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

" Logical positivists have never taken psychology into account in their epistemology, but they affirm that logical beings and mathematical beings are nothing but linguistic structures. "

" Logical reasoning is an argument which we have with ourselves and which reproduces internally the features of a real argument. "

" Logic and mathematics are nothing but specialised linguistic structures. "

" One of the most striking things one finds about the child under 7-8 is his extreme assurance on all subjects. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Play is the answer to the question, 'How does anything new come about?' "

" Play is the work of childhood. "

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

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

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