Jean Piaget Quotes

Whatever happens in the world is real, what one thinks should have happened is projection. We suffer more from our fictitious illusion and expectations of reality.

I always look at people and think how I would cast them.

People come from a certain generation and a certain whole way of looking at things, and you really do become a prisoner of your own world.

Sometimes people mistake the way I talk for what I am thinking.

Open-mindedness is considered to be a virtue. But, strictly speaking, it cannot occur. A new experience must be redacted into old categories. We cannot handle each event freshly in its own right. If we did so, of what use would past experience be?

It's not only imagination, it's the distortion of the vision. You suddenly think, This person is idealistic, this person is strong, this person has dreams, when you know better most of the time. You put what you want to see on people.

I respond well to what I read of Immanuel Kant's idea that the world as we see it is absolutely a function of the way our brain works. In the modern parlance, it's an evolved machine that we carry with us.

During the earliest stages the child perceives things like a solipsist who is unaware of himself as subject and is familiar only with his own actions.

Obviously the facts are never just coming at you but are incorporated by an imagination that is formed by your previous experience. Memories of the past are not memories of facts but memories of your imaginings of the facts.

The problem I have with making an intelligent statement is that some people then think it's not an isolated occurrence.

It's so easy for us to misperceive and see the things in others that we want to see. And, when we're wrong, and often we're dead wrong, we miss the truth.

I'm not interested in observed reality.

Men in general are quick to believe that which they wish to be true.

There is a very remarkable inclination in human nature to bestow on external objects the same emotions which it observes in itself, and to find every where those ideas which are most present to it.

Reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know.

Size is not a reality, but a construct of the mind; and space a construct to contain constructs.

We are all disposed to attribute to other's motives and views that we have entertained ourselves.

Remember, we see the world not as it is but as we are. Most of us see through the eyes of our fears and our limiting beliefs and our false assumptions.

The less you know about the person, the more you fill in the rosiest details.

I suppose we are what we are, and we use the evidence to confirm what we believe.

The world is large, very large. My head is small, quite small. There is no way I can put the world in my head. Nevertheless, I have been trying to elaborate some kind of representation.

I keep trying to understand the phenomenon of why adults are so literal when children are so imaginative. Toys are a caricature of reality.

Most people project onto you what they think you can do.

Look at other people and ask yourself if you are really seeing them or just your thoughts about them.... Without knowing it, we are coloring everything, putting our spin on it all.

I made you take time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flower, you hung all your associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see—and I don't.