Jean Piaget Quotes

Jean Piaget observed that scarcely any question seems absurd to a child, but he was silent on the question of absurd answers from adults.

During the earliest stages of thought, accommodation remains on the surface of physical as well as social experience.

Impossible is relative.

You mean you live down here?' Matilda asked. 'I do', Miss Honey replied, but she said no more. Matilda had never once stopped to think about where Miss Honey might be living. She had always regarded her purely as a teacher, a person who turned up out of nowhere and taught at school and then went away again.

I have a theory that the hosts are like babies. Whatever you do, they will learn, imitate, and do it back. It's like the purity and clarity of a newborn. If they're a clean slate, there's no agenda - just the need to survive.

But to live in ignorance on such a point was impossible.

Thinking is a bit uncomfortable, but you'll get used to it. A matter of time and practice.

To understand possible means to understand impossible.

What is not in nature can never be true.

It is my conviction that basic Reality is not all that perplexing. What seems difficult to assimilate are the manifold details of Reality, not its fundamental elements.

Our minds are specifically adapted to developing certain theories, and we have a science if the theories that are available to our minds happen to be close to true. Well, there is no particular reason to suppose that the intersection of true theories and theories that are accessible to the mind is very large. It may not be very large.

The child learns to believe a host of things. I.e. it learns to act according to these beliefs. Bit by bit there forms a system of what is believed, and in that system some things stand unshakeably fast and some are more or less liable to shift. What stands fast does so, not because it is intrinsically obvious or convincing; it is rather held fast by what lies around it.

We ought not to desire the impossible.

Dr. Leonard Shlain, chairman of laparoscopic surgery at California Pacific Medical Center, said they took some four and five year-olds and gave them video games and asked them to figure out how to play them without instructions. Then they watched their brain activity with real-time monitors. At first, when they were figuring out the games, he said, the whole brain lit up. But by the time they knew how to play the games, the brain went dark, except for one little point.

Our concepts structure what we perceive, how we get around in the world and how we relate to other people. Our conceptual system thus plays a central role in defining our everyday realities.

The percept is the reality. It is not in propositional form. But the most immediate judgment concerning it is abstract. It is therefore essentially unlike the reality, although it must be accepted as true to that reality. Its truth consists in the fact that it is impossible to correct it, and in the fact that it only professes to consider one aspect of the percept.

Growing old is partly an inescapable process of accommodation and adjustment.

I had my dreams of Venice, but nothing that I had dreamed was as impossible as what I found.

If a baby really has no awareness of himself and is totally thing-directed and at the same time all his states of mind are projected onto things, our second paradox makes sense: on the one hand, thought in babies can be viewed as pure accommodation or exploratory movements, but on the other this very same thought is only one, long, completely autistic waking dream.

The young mind is pliable and imitates, but in more advanced states grows rigid and must be warmed and softened before it will receive a deep impression.

In academic life you seek to state absolute truths; in politics you seek to accommodate truth to the facts around you.

The tools we use have a profound and devious influence on our thinking habits, and therefore on our thinking abilities.

Part of growing up is making sure your sense of reality isn't entirely grounded in your own mind.

There is, therefore, no difficulty in answering such questions as these. What cause was there why the Universe was placed in such a part of Space? and, Why was the Universe created at such a Time? for, if there be no Space beyond the Universe, it was impossible that it should be created in another place; and if there was no Time before, it was impossible it should be created at another time.

It is impossible to survive in a prolonged state of reality.