Jerome Bruner Quotes

23 Sourced Quotes

The shrewd guess, the fertile hypothesis, the courageous leap to a tentative conclusion—these are the most valuable coin of the thinker at work.

Jerome Bruner
There is a deep question whether the possible meanings that emerge from an effort to explain the experience of art may not mask the real meanings of a work of art.

Jerome Bruner
Organizing facts in terms of principles and ideas from which they may be inferred is the only known way of reducing the quick rate of loss of human memory.

Jerome Bruner
The agentive mind is not only active in nature, but it seeks out dialogue and discourse with other active minds. And it is through this dialogic, discursive process that we come to know the Other and his points of view, his stories. We learn an enormous amount not only about the world but about ourselves by discourse with Others.

Jerome Bruner
Surely knowledge of the natural world, knowledge of the human condition, knowledge of the nature and dynamics of society, knowledge of the past so that one may use it in experiencing the present and aspiring to the future--all of these, it would seem reasonable to suppose, are essential to an educated man. To these must be added another--knowledge of the products of our artistic heritage that mark the history of our esthetic wonder and delight.

Jerome Bruner
It is sentimentalism to assume that the teaching of life can always be fitted to the child's interests, just as it is empty formalism to force the child to parrot the formulas of adult society. Interests can be created and stimulated.

Jerome Bruner
The teaching of probabilistic reasoning, so very common and important a feature of modern science, is hardly developed in our educational system before college.

Jerome Bruner
I am inclined to give up the attempt as hopeless. Those who do not understand, it seems cannot be made to understand.

Jerome Bruner
We cannot, even given our most imaginative efforts, construct a concept of Self that does not impute some causal influence of prior mental states on later ones.

Jerome Bruner
If we are not to live in embarrassed dread in the century ahead, we will have to understand the mathematical ideas that lie behind the scientific advances that are shaping the modern world.

Jerome Bruner
We need to conceive of ourselves as "agents" impelled by self-generated intentions.

Jerome Bruner
Being able to "go beyond the information" given to "figure things out" is one of the few untarnishable joys of life.

Jerome Bruner
To understand something is, first, to give up some other way of conceiving of it. Between one way of conceiving and a better way, there often lies confusion.

Jerome Bruner
Any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development.

Jerome Bruner
Whoever reflects recognizes that there are empty and lonely spaces between one's experiences.

Jerome Bruner
Apollo without Dionysus may indeed be a well-informed, good citizen but he's a dull fellow. He may even be 'cultured,' in the sense one often gets from traditionalist writings in education.... But without Dionysus he will never make and remake a culture.

Jerome Bruner
Understanding something in one way does not preclude understanding it in other ways.

Jerome Bruner
In time, and as one comes to benefit from experience, one learns that things will turn out neither as well as one hoped nor as badly as one feared.

Jerome Bruner
Passion, like discriminating taste, grows on its use. You more likely act yourself into feeling than feel yourself into action.

Jerome Bruner
For while species develop in an extraordinarily chancy way from the bottom of the tree upward, human lives, even when haphazard, reek with purpose.

Jerome Bruner
I would urge that the yeast of education is the idea of excellence, and the idea of excellence comprises as many forms as there are individuals, each of whom develops his own image of excellence. The school must have as one of its principal functions the nurturing of images of excellence.

Jerome Bruner
Discovery, like surprise, favors the well-prepared mind.

Jerome Bruner
We carry with us habits of thought and taste fostered in some nearly forgotten classroom by a certain teacher.

Jerome Bruner