Jean Piaget Quotes

In Psychology we deal with minds and their processes, and leave out of account as far as possible the objects that we get to know by means of them.

Both expectations and memories are more than mere images founded on previous experience.

Whatever we know without inference is mental.

That in the soul which is called the mind is, before it thinks, not actually any real thing.

How can we speak of the action of the mind under any divisions, as of its knowledge, of its ethics, of its works, and so forth, since it melts will into perception, knowledge into act? Each becomes the other. Itself alone is.

Because our entire universe is made up of consciousness, we never really experience the universe directly we just experience our consciousness of the universe, our perception of it, so right, our only universe is perception.

In all the sciences except Psychology we deal with objects and their changes, and leave out of account as far as possible the mind which observes them.

Such being the nature of mental life, the business of psychology is primarily to describe in detail the various forms which attention or conation assumes upon the different levels of that life.

It is convenient to distinguish the two kinds of experience which have thus been described, the experienc-ing and the experienc-ed, by technical words.

We're all just bags of bones and muscle and hormones; I'll never understand what makes our minds do the things we do. It's like that statue of the monkey holding a skull. We're trying to use a thing we don't understand to understand ourselves.

Remembrance and reflection how allied. What thin partitions divides sense from thought.

I think generally I'm kind of interested in subjective experience, what goes on inside someone's head, that being all they really know of the world.

I became really interested in the study of consciousness.

If you use your mind to study reality, you won't understand either your mind or reality. If you study reality without using your mind, you'll understand both.

Without consciousness, space and time are nothing.

Everybody agrees that the brain is a remarkable machine. It's capable of generating an enormous number of phenomena, some of them very obvious and some of them less obvious. But I think that in the end there are going to be some very basic explanations for many things: emotions, awareness, consciousness, attention, perception, recognition.

Our thoughts have an order, not of themselves, but because the mind generates the spatio-temporal relationships involved in every experience.

Man is a recording animal.

There are two distinctive peculiarities by reference to which we characterize the soul (1) local movement and (2) thinking, discriminating, and perceiving. Thinking both speculative and practical is regarded as akin to a form of perceiving; for in the one as well as the other the soul discriminates and is cognizant of something which is.

What is being awake if not interpreting our dreams, or dreaming if not interpreting our wake?

We bring about a world in consciousness that is partly what is given, and partly what we bring, something that comes into being through this particular conjunction and no other. And the key to this is the kind of attention we pay to the world.

What do you think of the human mind? I mean, in case you think there is a human mind.

The brain is not, and cannot be, the sole or complete organ of thought and feeling.

I can myself conceive of nothing else than the experienced.

Do you even recognize your own consciousness?