Lev Vygotsky Quotes

Language is one of the fundamental principles of human understanding. It is the way we interact with each other and how we grasp the world we live in. Intelligence is the ability to avoid doing work, yet getting the work done.

Language was a huge expansion of that capacity to deal with information.

Man is multiplied by the number of languages he possesses and speaks.

Plainly, children learn their language. I don't speak Swahili. And it cannot be that my language is 'an innate property of our brain.' Otherwise I would have been genetically programmed to speak (some variety of) English.

Language is, without a doubt, the most momentous and at the same time the most mysterious product of the human mind.

Not only the entire ability to think rests on language... but language is also the crux of the misunderstanding of reason with itself.

The mind of the polyglot is a very particular thing, and scientists are only beginning to look closely at how acquiring a second language influences learning, behavior and the very structure of the brain itself.

As soon as there is language, generality has entered the scene.

We human beings were never born to read; we invented reading and then had to teach it to every new generation. Each new reader comes to reading with a 'fresh' brain - one that is programmed to speak, see, and think, but not to read.

If you can't get a word at first, it's always waiting somewhere, and it's just a case of finding it.

Because everyone uses language to talk, everyone thinks he can talk about language.

Language is so inherent to humanity, so necessary for even basic thinking, that stories and poetry are available to anyone who can process language.

We become full human agents, capable of understanding ourselves, and hence of defining our identity, through our acquisition of rich human languages of expression.

I don't speak ... I operate a machine called language. It creaks and groans, but is mine own.

The fact is that if you have not developed language, you simply don't have access to most of human experience, and if you don't have access to experience, then you're not going to be able to think properly.

I listen to people talking sometimes, that great river that is language, with all its undercurrents of grammar and nuance, and I wonder how we all learn so quickly to speak it, given that we begin when we are barely old enough to stand upright. I have no memory of finding it hard. Indeed, I have no memory of it at all.

Why can't the English teach their children how to speak?

Adults devise a plan and follow it, children do what feels good.

Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.

A man with a scant vocabulary will almost certainly be a weak thinker. The richer and more copious one's vocabulary and the greater one's awareness of fine distinctions and subtle nuances of meaning, the more fertile and precise is likely to be one's thinking. Knowledge of things and knowledge of the words for them grow together. If you do not know the words, you can hardly know the thing.

Experience proves that anyone who has studied geometry is infinitely quicker to grasp difficult subjects than one who has not.

The child begins to perceive the world not only through his [or her] eyes but also through his [or her] speech

We are storytelling creatures, and as children we acquire language to tell those stories that we have inside us.

help conquer the IQ shortage worry less and think more

In some small field each child should attain, within the limited range of its experience and observation, the power to draw a justly limited inference from observed facts.