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

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

Logical positivists have never taken psychology into account in their epistemology, but they affirm that logical beings and mathematical beings are nothing but linguistic structures.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

The first type of abstraction from objects I shall refer to as simple abstraction, but the second type I shall call reflective abstraction, using this term in a double sense.

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

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.

Logic and mathematics are nothing but specialised linguistic structures.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

The more the schemata are differentiated, the smaller the gap between the new and the familiar becomes, so that novelty, instead of constituting an annoyance avoided by the subject, becomes a problem and invites searching.

Reflective abstraction, however, is based not on individual actions but on coordinated actions.

From this time on, the universe is built up into an aggregate of permanent objects connected by causal relations that are independent of the subject and are placed in objective space and time.

Everyone knows that at the age of 11-12, children have a marked impulse to form themselves into groups and that the respect paid to the rules and regulations of their play constitutes an important feature of this social life.

Intelligence is what you use when you don't know what to do: when neither innateness nor learning has prepared you for the particular situation.

Logical activity is not the whole of intelligence. One can be intelligent without being particularly logical.

One of the most striking things one finds about the child under 7-8 is his extreme assurance on all subjects.

Play is the work of childhood.

The child of three or four is saturated with adult rules. His universe is dominated by the idea that things are as they ought to be, that everyone's actions conform to laws that are both physical and moral - in a word, that there is a Universal Order.

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.

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 main functions of intelligence, that of inventing solutions and that of verifying them, do not necessarily involve one another. The first partakes of imagination; the second alone is properly logical.

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

Equilibrium is the profoundest tendency of all human activity.

Punishment renders autonomy of conscience impossible.

The law is agnostic about truth.

A certain ambiguity of rhythm is one of the beauties of a poem.

Biology can be said to define possibilities but not determine them it is never irrelevant but it is also not determinant.

You will never exaggerate when you speak good things of God. It is not possible to do so. Try, dear brethren, and boast in the Lord.

You know yourself, once you've had the excitement of riding thoroughbreds, it's not very interesting riding anything else. But I still love horses; I just don't have one any more.

People make mistakes. And one of the mistakes that the United States consistently made was that it could intervene and somehow adjust people's governments, especially in the Middle East.

For me, the challenge of a period film is that, unlike a contemporary film where the character can be very free-form when it comes to the acting, there's a burden to acting in a period film because you have to stay within the character's historical background and the gestures of certain periods.

Government has a rightful role, but not an excessive role, to play.

Writers divide fairly cleanly into those who only work through what they hear and those who are more visual. I am the latter, where I lie down on my office floor and play scenes through my head to - cinematically, several times with different elements - to see what works. I can't write a scene until I can see it.

Write every day. Make writing a part of your life, but also don't be afraid of learning from others because I think you can. I still try to think of myself as a beginner because that way I can keep on learning.

That's the other thing about working on movies, the commitment is years. That's one thing that's so frustrating about the process is that it goes on and on and on for years.

My mother's background was Scottish. She came from an old family, some of whom lived in upper New York State and some of whom had come over from Scotland.

You can't have unity without diversity.

Keep faith. The most amazing things in life tend to happen right at the moment you’re about to give up hope.