Lev Vygotsky Quotes

Thought and speech are inseparable from each other. Matter and expression are parts of one; style is a thinking out into language.

We think in language. We think in words. Language is the landscape of thought.

By speaking, by thinking, we undertake to clarify things, and that forces us to exacerbate them, dislocate them, schematize them. Every concept is in itself an exaggeration.

Thought is prior to language and consists in the simultaneous presentation to the mind of two different images.

Thought is not merely expressed in words, it comes into existence through them

The words of the world want to make sentences.

Understanding is nothing else than conception caused by speech.

At the lowest cognitive level, they are processes of experiencing, or, to speak more generally, processes of intuiting that grasp the object in the original.

Speech is external thought, and thought internal speech.

Awareness of universals is called conceiving, and a universal of which we are aware is called a concept.

In complex trains of thought signs are indispensable.

Man does not speak because he thinks; he thinks because he speaks. Or rather, speaking is no different than thinking: to speak is to think.

Then there is the further question of what is the relationship of thinking to reality. As careful attention shows, thought itself is in an actual process of movement.

Reason enables us to get around in the world of ideas, but cannot prescribe our thoughts.

The soul never thinks without a picture.

All thought must, directly or indirectly, by way of certain characters, relate ultimately to intuitions, and therefore, with us, to sensibility, because in no other way can an object be given to us.

I don't think there is such a thing as an idea without words, because your language is your thought.

Thought itself needs words. It runs on them like a long wire. And if it loses the habit of words, little by little it becomes shapeless, somber.

The names for things don't come first. Words stagger after, hopelessly trying to become the sensation.

Those things for which we find words, are things we have already overcome.

We think not in words but in shadows of words.

Which came first, the mind or the idea of the mind? Have you never wondered? They arrived together. The mind is an idea.

The objective world is the order of nature, thinking or reflection follows the suggestions of sense experience, and words are the servomechanisms of reflection.

We think in language. The quality of our thoughts and ideas can only be as good as the quality of our language.

I don't think there is any scientific evidence about the question of whether we think only in language or not. But introspection indicates pretty clearly that we don't think in language necessarily. We also think in visual images, we think in terms of situations and events, and so on, and many times we can't even express in words what the content of our thinking is. And even if we are able to express it in words, it is a common experience to say something and then to recognize that it is not what we meant, that it is something else.