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

“The child often sees only what he already knows. He projects the whole of his verbal thought into things. He sees mountains as built by men, rivers as dug out with spades, the sun and moon as following us on our walks.”

“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.”

“To express the same idea in still another way, I think that human knowledge is essentially active.”

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

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

“The goal of education is not to increase the amount of knowledge but to create the possibilities for a child to invent and discover, to create men who are capable of doing new things.”

“The current state of knowledge is a moment in history, changing just as rapidly as the state of knowledge in the past has ever changed and, in many instances, more rapidly.”

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

“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.”

“On the one hand, there are individual actions such as throwing, pushing, touching, rubbing. It is these individual actions that give rise most of the time to abstraction from objects.”