Jean Piaget Quotes

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Jean Piaget

Profession : Psychologist

Birth : August 9, 1896

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

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

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

Jean Piaget

The child of three or four is saturated with adult rules. His universe is dominated by the idea that things are as they ought to be, that everyone's actions conform to laws that are both physical and moral - in a word, that there is a Universal Order.

Jean Piaget

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

Jean Piaget

Scientific thought, then, is not momentary; it is not a static instance; it is a process.

Jean Piaget

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

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

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

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.

Jean Piaget

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

Jean Piaget

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

Jean Piaget

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

Jean Piaget

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.

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.

Jean Piaget

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

The practice of narrative and argument does not lead to invention, but it compels a certain coherence of thought.

Jean Piaget

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

Jean Piaget

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

Jean Piaget

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.

Jean Piaget