Author Profile
Jean Piaget
1896 – 1980 • Swiss • Psychologist
46
Total Quotes
Collected Meditations
Showing 46 quotesAll 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
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
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.— Jean Piaget
The practice of narrative and argument does not lead to invention, but it compels a certain coherence of thought.— 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
Scientific thought, then, is not momentary; it is not a static instance; it is a process.— Jean Piaget
Logical reasoning is an argument which we have with ourselves and which reproduces internally the features of a real argument.— Jean Piaget
Reflective abstraction, however, is based not on individual actions but on coordinated actions.— Jean Piaget
The more the schemata are differentiated, the smaller the gap between the new and the familiar becomes, so that novelty, instead of constituting an annoyance avoided by the subject, becomes a problem and invites searching.— Jean Piaget
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
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
Knowing reality means constructing systems of transformations that correspond, more or less adequately, to reality.— 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
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
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
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
In genetic epistemology, as in developmental psychology, too, there is never an absolute beginning.— 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