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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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