Lev Vygotsky Quotes

Play reaches the habits most needed for intellectual growth.

The kids who speak well, are articulate and intelligent, are all readers.

Through writing, through that process, they realize that they become more intelligent, and more honest and more imaginative than they can be in any other part of their life.

The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character - that is the goal of true education.

No one has to learn to spell to talk, right? You see a little kid holding a conversation with an adult. He probably doesn't know the words he's saying, but he knows where to fit them to make what he's thinking logical to what you're saying.

Some languages expand not only your ability to speak to different people but what you're able to think.

How we learn has nothing to do with how brilliant we are.

Man's achievements rest upon the use of symbols

The basis of anything is education, so that people not only become qualified, but essentially become able to create new knowledge

The finest minds seem to be formed rather by efforts at original thinking, by endeavors to form new combinations, and to discover new truths, than by passively receiving the impressions of other men's ideas.

The importance of all education lies far more in the training of minds than in any facts which may be absorbed, for trained minds will ascertain the facts as they need to know them. Having learned to reason and to weigh the information they discover, people with such minds will be more nearly educated than any amount of cramming of definite facts into their heads will make them.

Birds and animals probably think without knowing that they think; that is, they have not self-consciousness. Only man seems to be endowed with this faculty; he alone develops disinterested intelligence, intelligence that is not primarily concerned with his own safety and well-being but that looks abroad upon things.

I've written a number of books that have to do with the evolution of humans, human intelligence, human emotions.

Many people must have noticed the intense attention given by children to the conversation of grown-ups when they cannot possibly be understanding a word of what they hear. They are trying to get hold of words, and they often demonstrate this fact by repeating joyously some word which they have been able to grasp.

I love learning language and ideas that I didn't know before and making them sound like my own.

If you can't hear language, you won't be able to understand language and experience normal development. Every minute spent without hearing is a minute a child is not getting back.

If the tongue had not been framed for articulation, man would still be a beast in the forest.

Many of you have been reared on the cliche that the purpose of education isn't to stuff your head with facts but to teach you how to think. Wrong.

You don't get smarter by not learning stuff.

I would say I have become a lot smarter in the way I understand things.

I reserve the right to think many different things and to change my mind and to even be wrong.

Learning and the exchange of ideas is dramatic.

You cannot simplify human intelligence, emotion, and growth. To watch the frills and furbelows of a human psyche is fascinating.

I am convinced that the act of thinking logically cannot possibly be natural to the human mind. If it were, then mathematics would be everybody's easiest course at school and our species would not have taken several millennia to figure out the scientific method.

Much learning does not teach sense.