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.

Teaching means creating situations where structures can be discovered.

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.

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

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

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.

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.