Jean Piaget Quotes

I secretly think reality exists so we can speculate about it.

What, then is truth?... Truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are.

To know the world, one must construct it

Without knowing the Knower, all the knowledge that one gathers cannot be valid.

Facts do not convey truth. That's a mistake. Facts create norms, but truth creates illumination.

Truth is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations.

Even when we look at nature, our imagination constructs the picture.

Reality is a question of perspective.

Intelligence is the shadow of objective truth. How can the shadow vie with sunshine?

Between certainty and the real, an ancient enmity.

Every human being relies on and is bounded by his knowledge and experience to live. This is what we call “reality”. However, knowledge and experience are ambiguous, thus reality can become illusion. Is it not possible to think that, all human beings are living in their assumptions?

Subjectivity is objective.

Every man feels that perception gives him an invincible belief of the existence of that which he perceives; and that this belief is not the effect of reasoning, but the immediate consequence of perception. When philosophers have wearied themselves and their readers with their speculations upon this subject, they can neither strengthen this belief, nor weaken it; nor can they shew how it is produced. It puts the philosopher and the peasant upon a level; and neither of them can give any other reason for believing his senses, than that he finds it impossible for him to do otherwise.

If faith is what you have to go on, if faith is the link between your beliefs and the world at large, your beliefs are very likely to be wrong. Beliefs can be right or wrong. If you believe you can fly, that belief is only true if indeed you can fly. Somebody who thinks he can fly, and is wrong about it, will eventually discover there's a problem with his view of the world.

We may well ask, What causes induce us to believe in the existence of body? but 'tis vain to ask. Whether there be body or not? That is a point which we must take for granted in all our reasonings.

I can believe things that are true and things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not.

I don't think the world objectively exists the way we think it exists. There's a constant sort of storytelling process.

... no bell in us tolls to let us know for certain when truth is in our grasp.

Now that's a concept that's always fascinated me: the real world. Only a very specific subset of people use the term, have you noticed? To me, it seems self-evident that everyone lives in the real world - we all breathe real oxygen, eat real food, the earth under our feet feels equally solid to all of us. But clearly these people have a far more tightly circumscribed definition of reality, one that I find deeply mysterious, and an almost pathologically intense need to bring others into line with that definition.

You can only photograph a fragment of the here and now. The photograph presents the world as object; language, the world as idea.

The problem for us is less to discover the way it really is than to see the meaning of the way.

Man is the measure of all things, of the reality of those which are, and of the unreality of those which are not.

Truth happens to an idea

Reality is the completion of experience.

One can never really give a proof of the reality of anything; reality is not something open to proof, it is something established. It is established just because proof is not enough. It is this characteristic of language, at once indispensable and inadequate, which shows the reality of the external world. Most people hardly ever realize this, because it is rare that the very same man thinks and puts his thought into action.