Jerome Bruner Quotes

Sensorial perception, for example, certainly occurs with greater or less accuracy according to the degree of interest; it is constantly given other directions by the change of external stimuli and by ideas.

I am convinced that there is no sort of boundary between the living and the mental or between the biological and the psychological. From the moment an organism takes account of a previous experience and adapts to a new situation, that very much resembles psychology.

Rather than being a luxury, emotions are a very intelligent way of driving an organism toward certain outcomes.

We do not merely perceive objects and hold thoughts in our minds: all our perceptions and thought processes are felt. All have a distinctive component that announces an unequivocal link between images and the existence of life in our organism.

You can really get poked in the back and not feel it very much, but just a feather around your lips and you really do feel it.

The sense organs experience the external light, sound, etc. with difficulty; the different sense organs only have a so-called specific receptivity for particular stimuli.

A very receptive state of mind... not unlike a sheet of film itself - seemingly inert, yet so sensitive that a fraction of a second's exposure conceives a life in it.

It works. People respond to it.

We are by nature observers, and thereby learners. That is our permanent state.

The world itself is so full of changes - of negotiations, changes of position, seeing things one way, then another, gauging responses, status changes that can happen in an instant.

The infinite wonders of the universe are revealed to us in exact measure as we are capable of receiving them. The keenness of our vision depends not on how much we can see, but on how much we feel.

Receptivity requires a nimbleness, a fine-honed sensitivity in order to let one's self be the vehicle of whatever vision may emerge.

I take that as an insult, even at 36.

The only people without problems are those in cemeteries. It is not what happens to us that separates failures from successes. It is how we perceive and what we do about what happens that makes the difference.

[D]oes the real world have any more substance than visions and hallucinations when we're having them? At any given moment, what's happening in our minds is all and everything that happens.

People who move to New York always the same mistake. They can't see the place.

Whether we change our lives or do nothing, we have responded. To do nothing is to do something.

The sea where living creatures were at one time immersed is now enclosed within their bodies.

Madness, as I understood it from books, meant a person who was open to the high white whine of everything.

We are sensitized by the books we read. And the more books we read, and the deeper their lessons sink into us, the more pairs of glasses we have. And those glasses enable us to see things we would have otherwise missed.

Of the Surface of Things In my room, the world is beyond my understanding; But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four Hills and a cloud.

I love playing in America. I feel having been there a few times that I "get" America a lot more than I used to. It used to be so strange to me. It takes years to learn how to separate the actual, major, important differences from the superficial differences that aren't essential or crucial.

People often ... have no idea how fair the flower is to the touch, nor do they appreciate its fragrance, which is the soul of the flower.

It isn't the things that happen to us in our lives that cause us to suffer, it's how we relate to the things that happen to us that causes us to suffer.

Knowing that one is always capable of change, the second step lies in making the decision to change. Change does not occur by merely willing it anymore than behavior changes simply through insight.