Jerome Bruner Quotes

“Education must, be not only a transmission of culture but also a provider of alternative views of the world and a strengthener of the will to explore them.”

“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.”

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

“In sum, then, "thinking about thinking" has to be a principal ingredient of any empowering practice of education.”

“Being able to "go beyond the information" given to "figure things out" is one of the few untarnishable joys of life. One of the great triumphs of learning (and of teaching) is to get things organised in your head in a way that permits you to know more than you "ought" to. And this takes reflection, brooding about what it is that you know. The enemy of reflection is the breakneck pace - the thousand pictures.”

“Luther and Calvin believed that both the Roman church on the right and the Zwinglian and Anabaptist churches on the left made the Lord's Supper too much a place WHERE BELIEVERS DID THINGS FOR GOD - either by offering Christ to God (Rome) or by offering their deep devotion to God (the Radical Protestants). The main direction of the Supper, in both of these views, was up.”

“I can see the humorous side of things and enjoy the fun when it comes; but look where I will, there seems to me always more sadness than joy in life.”

“What I am looking for is a blessing not in disguise.”

“It is in our faults and failings, not in our virtues, that we touch each other, and find sympathy. It is in our follies that we are one.”

“We drink one another's health and spoil our own.”