Top 60 Jean Piaget Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Play is the work of childhood.”

— Jean Piaget

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2. “Intelligence is what you use when you don’t know what to do.”

— Jean Piaget

Featured in: Learning Quotes, Quotes About Thinking, Intelligence Quotes

3. “What we see changes what we know. What we know changes what we see.”

— Jean Piaget

Featured in: Psychology Quotes

4. “Children require long, uninterrupted periods of play and exploration.”

— Jean Piaget

Featured in: Quotes About Kids, Growing Up Quotes, Quotes About Childhood

5. “Every time we teach a child something, we keep him from inventing it himself. On the other hand, that which we allow him to discover for himself will remain with him visible for the rest of his life.”

— Jean Piaget

Featured in: Education Quotes, Quotes About Childhood

6. “Experience precedes understanding.”

— Jean Piaget

7. “When you teach a child something you take away forever his chance of discovering it for himself.”

— Jean Piaget

8. “The principle goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done.”

— Jean Piaget

Featured in: Education Quotes

9. “Teaching means creating situations where structures can be discovered.”

— Jean Piaget

Featured in: Education Quotes

10. “Are we forming children who are only capable of learning what is already known? Or should we try to develop creative and innovative minds, capable of discovery from the preschool age on, throughout life?”

— Jean Piaget

11. “Play is the answer to how anything new comes about.”

— Jean Piaget

12. “Only education is capable of saving our societies from possible collapse, whether violent, or gradual.”

— Jean Piaget

13. “To understand is to invent.”

— Jean Piaget

14. “Equilibrium is the profoundest tendency of all human activity.”

— Jean Piaget

15. “Scientific knowledge is in perpetual evolution; it finds itself changed from one day to the next.”

— Jean Piaget

16. “Children have real understanding only of that which they invent themselves, and each time that we try to teach them too quickly, we keep them from reinventing it themselves.”

— Jean Piaget

17. “How much more precious is a little humanity than all the rules in the world.”

— Jean Piaget

18. “We learn more when we are compelled to invent.”

— Jean Piaget

19. “Logic and mathematics are nothing but specialised linguistic structures.”

— Jean Piaget

20. “What is desired is that the teacher ceased being a lecturer, satisfied with transmitting ready-made solutions. His role should rather be that of a mentor stimulating initiative and research.”

— Jean Piaget

21. “I could not think without writing.”

— Jean Piaget

22. “Moral autonomy appears when the mind regards as necessary an ideal that is independent of all external pressures.”

— Jean Piaget

23. “It is with children that we have the best chance of studying the development of logical knowledge, mathematical knowledge, physical knowledge, and so forth.”

— Jean Piaget

24. “Each time one prematurely teaches a child something he could have discovered himself, that child is kept from inventing it and consequently from understanding it completely.”

— Jean Piaget

25. “The more we try to improve our schools, the heavier the teaching task becomes; and the better our teaching methods the more difficult they are to apply.”

— Jean Piaget

Featured in: School Quotes

26. “True interest appears when the self identifies itself with ideas or objects, when it finds in them a means of expression and they become a necessary form of fuel for its activity.”

— Jean Piaget

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

— Jean Piaget

28. “During the earliest stages of thought, accommodation remains on the surface of physical as well as social experience.”

— Jean Piaget

29. “Children should be able to do their own experimenting and their own research. Teachers, of course, can guide them by providing appropriate materials, but the essential thing is that in order for a child to understand something, he must construct it himself, he must re-invent it. Every time we teach a child something, we keep him from inventing it himself. On the other hand that which we allow him to discover by himself will remain with him visibly for the rest of his life.”

— Jean Piaget

30. “The self thus becomes aware of itself, at least in its practical action, and discovers itself as a cause among other causes and as an object subject to the same laws as other objects.”

— Jean Piaget

31. “I am convinced that there is no sort of boundary between the living and the mental or between the biological and the psychological. From the moment an organism takes account of a previous experience and adapts to a new situation, that very much resembles psychology.”

— Jean Piaget

32. “Punishment renders autonomy of conscience impossible.”

— Jean Piaget

33. “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.”

— Jean Piaget

34. “The child who defines a lie as being a “naughty word” knows perfectly well that lying consists in not speaking the truth. He is not, therefore, mistaking one thing for another, he is simply identifying them one with another by what seems to us a quaint extension of the word “lie”.”

— Jean Piaget

35. “In genetic epistemology, as in developmental psychology, too, there is never an absolute beginning.”

— Jean Piaget

36. “As far as the game of marbles is concerned, there is therefore no contradiction between the egocentric practice of games and the mystical respect entertained for rules. This respect is the mark of a mentality fashioned, not by free cooperation between equals, but by adult constraint.”

— Jean Piaget

37. “This means that no single logic is strong enough to support the total construction of human knowledge.”

— Jean Piaget

38. “Every acquisition of accommodation becomes material for assimilation, but assimilation always resists new accommodations.”

— Jean Piaget

39. “Knowing reality means constructing systems of transformations that correspond, more or less adequately, to reality.”

— Jean Piaget

40. “Scientific thought, then, is not momentary; it is not a static instance; it is a process.”

— Jean Piaget

41. “In other words, knowledge of the external world begins with an immediate utilisation of things, whereas knowledge of self is stopped by this purely practical and utilitarian contact.”

— Jean Piaget

42. “As you know, Bergson pointed out that there is no such thing as disorder but rather two sorts of order, geometric and living.”

— Jean Piaget

43. “The most developed science remains a continual becoming.”

— Jean Piaget

44. “Knowledge is not predetermined by heredity; it is not predetermined in the things around us – in knowing things around him the subject always adds to them.”

— Jean Piaget

45. “What the genetic epistemology proposes is discovering the roots of the different varieties of knowledge, since its elementary forms, following to the next levels, including also the scientific knowledge.”

— Jean Piaget

46. “Accommodation of mental structures to reality implies the existence of assimilatory schemata apart from which any structure would be impossible.”

— Jean Piaget

47. “I have always detested any departure from reality, an attitude which I relate to my mother’s poor mental health.”

— Jean Piaget

48. “Our problem, from the point of view of psychology and from the point of view of genetic epistemology, is to explain how the transition is made from a lower level of knowledge to a level that is judged to be higher.”

— Jean Piaget

49. “So we must start from this dual nature of intelligence as something both biological and logical.”

— Jean Piaget

50. “We shall simply say then that every action involves an energetic or affective aspect and a structural or cognitive aspect, which, in fact, unites the different points of view already mentioned.”

— Jean Piaget