Jean Piaget - Mind Quotes

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The essential functions of the mind consist in understanding and in inventing, in other words, in building up structures by structuring reality.

Jean Piaget
If only we could know what was going on in a baby's mind while observing him in action we could certainly understand everything there is to psychology.

Jean Piaget
It is as his own mind comes into contact with others that truth will begin to acquire value in the child's eyes and will consequently become a moral demand that can be made upon him. As long as the child remains egocentric, truth as such will fail to interest him and he will see no harm in transposing facts in accordance with his desires.

Jean Piaget
If a baby really has no awareness of himself and is totally thing-directed and at the same time all his states of mind are projected onto things, our second paradox makes sense: on the one hand, thought in babies can be viewed as pure accommodation or exploratory movements, but on the other this very same thought is only one, long, completely autistic waking dream.

Jean Piaget
In this way things, external objects, are assimilated to more or less ordered motor schemas, and in this continuous assimilation of objects the child's own activity is the starting point of play. Not only this, but when to pure movement are added language and imagination, the assimilation is strengthened, and wherever the mind feels no actual need for accommodating itself to reality, its natural tendency will be to distort the objects that surround it in accordance with its desires or its fantasy, in short to use them for its satisfaction. Such is the intellectual egocentrism that characterizes the earliest form of child thought.

Jean Piaget
Moral autonomy appears when the mind regards as necessary an ideal that is independent of all external pressures.

Jean Piaget
How can we, with our adult minds, know what will be interesting? If you follow the child...you can find out something new...

Jean Piaget