"At first sight the assimilative tendency shown by thought seems sufficient to secure stability in judgments. To assimilate, in psychology as in biology, is to reproduce oneself by means of the external world; it is to transform perceptions until they are identical with one’s own thought, i.e. with previous schemas. Assimilation is therefore preservation and, in a certain sense, identification." (Jean Piaget, "Judgement and Reasoning in the Child", 1928)
"In the presence of certain objects of thought or of certain affirmations the child, in virtue of previous experiences, adopts a certain way of reacting and thinking which is always the same, and which might be called a schema of reasoning. Such schemas are the functional equivalents of general propositions, but since the child is not conscious of these schemas before discussion and a desire for proof have laid them bare and at the same time changed their character, they cannot be said to constitute implicit general propositions. They simply constitute certain unconscious tendencies which live their own life but are submitted to no general systematization and consequently lead to no logical exactitude. To put it in another way, they form a logic of action but not yet a logic of thought." (Jean Piaget, "Judgement and Reasoning in the Child", 1928)
"Generally speaking, one can say that motor intelligence contains the germs of completed reason. But it gives promise of more than reason pure and simple. From the moral as from the intellectual point of view, the child is born neither good nor bad, but master of his destiny. Now, if there is intelligence in the schemas of motor adaptation, there is also the element of play. The intentionality peculiar to motor activity is not a search for truth but the pursuit of a result, whether objective or subjective; and to succeed is not to discover a truth." (Jean Piaget, "The Moral Judgment of the Child", 1932)
"In this way things, external objects, are assimilated to more or less ordered motor schemas, and in this continuous assimilation of objects the child's own activity is the starting point of play. Not only this, but when to pure movement are added language and imagination, the assimilation is strengthened, and wherever the mind feels no actual need for accommodating itself to reality, its natural tendency will be to distort the objects that surround it in accordance with its desires or its fantasy, in short to use them for its satisfaction. Such is the intellectual egocentrism that characterizes the earliest form of child thought." (Jean Piaget, "The Moral Judgment of the Child", 1932)
"Mixture of assimilation to earlier schemas and adaptation to the actual conditions of the situation is what defines motor intelligence. But - and this is where rules come into existence - as soon as a balance is established between adaptation and assimilation, the course of conduct adopted becomes crystallized and ritualized. New schemas are even established which the child looks for and retains with care, as though they were obligatory or charged with efficacy." (Jean Piaget, "The Moral Judgment of the Child", 1932)
"[T]he sudden inventions characteristic of the sixth stage [of infant development] are in reality the product of a long evolution of schemata and not only of an internal maturation of perceptive structures. [..] This is revealed by the existence of a fifth stage, characterized by experimental groping. […] What does this mean if not that the practice of actual experience is necessary in order to acquire the practice of mental experience and that invention does not arise entirely preformed despite appearances? (Jean Piaget, "The origin of intelligence in children" 1936)
"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." (Jean Piaget, "The Construction Of Reality In The Child", 1950)
"Accommodation of mental structures to reality implies the existence of assimilatory schemata apart from which any structure would be impossible." (Jean Piaget, "The Construction Of Reality In The Child", 1950)
"What in fact is the schema of the object? In one essential respect it is a schema belonging to intelligence. To have the concept of an object is to attribute the perceived figure to a substantial basis, so that the figure and the substance that it thus indicates continue to exist outside the perceptual field. The permanence of the object seen from this viewpoint is not only a product of intelligence, but constitutes the very first of those fundamental ideas of conservation which we shall see developing within the thought process." (Jean Piaget, "The Psychology of Intelligence", 1950)
"Knowing reality means constructing systems of transformations that correspond, more or less adequately, to reality. They are more or less isomorphic to transformations of reality. The transformational structures of which knowledge consists are not copies of the transformations in reality; they are simply possible isomorphic models among which experience can enable us to choose. Knowledge, then, is a system of transformations that become progressively adequate." (Jean Piaget, "Genetic Epistemology", 1968)
"The essential functions of the mind consist in understanding and in inventing, in other words, in building up structures by structuring reality." (Jean Piaget, 1971)
"A child[’s …] first geometrical discoveries are topological [...] If you ask him to copy a square or a triangle, he draws a closed circle." (Jean Piaget)
"The principle goal of education is to create men who are capable of doing new things, not simply of repeating what other generations have done – men who are creative, inventive and discoverers." (Jean Piaget)
"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." (Jean Piaget)
"We are constantly hatching an enormous number of false ideas, conceits, Utopias, mystical explanations, suspicions, and megalomaniacal fantasies, which disappear when brought into contact with other people." (Jean Piaget)
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