The essence of creativity is figuring out how to use what you already know in order to go beyond what you already think.

Good teaching is forever being on the cutting edge of a child's competence.

There is, perhaps, one universal truth about all forms of human cognition: the ability to deal with knowledge is hugely exceeded by the potential knowledge contained in man's environment. To cope with this diversity, man's perception, his memory, and his thought processes early become governed by strategies for protecting his limited capacities from the confusion of overloading. We tend to perceive things schematically, for example, rather than in detail, or we represent a class of diverse things by some sort of averaged "typical instance.

Telling others about oneself is...no simple matter. It depends on what we think they think we ought to be like

The main characteristic of play - whether of child or adult - is not it content but its mode. Play is an approach to action, not a form of activity.

In time, and as one comes to benefit from experience, one learns that things will turn out neither as well as one hoped nor as badly as one feared.

The shrewd guess, the fertile hypothesis, the courageous leap to a tentative conclusion - these are the most valuable coins of the thinker at work. But in most schools guessing is heavily penalized and is associated somehow with laziness.