Lev Vygotsky Quotes

“A child’s greatest achievements are possible in play, achievements that tomorrow will become her basic level of real action.”

“A mind cannot be independent of culture.”

“Any human act that gives rise to something new is referred to as a creative act, regardless of whether what is created is a physical object or some mental or emotional construct that lives within the person who created it and is known only to him.”

“Art is the collectivisation of feeling.”

“Childhood is a complex dialectical process characterized by periodicity, unevenness in the development of different functions, metamorphosis or qualitative transformation of one form into another, intertwining of external and internal factors, and adaptive processes which overcome impediments that the child encounters.”

“Every function in the child's cultural development appears twice: first, on the social level, and later, on the individual level; first, between people (interpsychological) and then inside the child (intrapsychological).

This applies equally to voluntary attention, to logical memory, and to the formation of concepts. All the higher functions originate as actual relationships between individuals.”

“Experience teaches us that thought does not express itself in words, but rather realizes itself in them”

“Human learning presupposes a specific social nature and a process by which children grow into the intellectual life of those around them”

“It may be said that the basic characteristic of human behavior in general is that humans personally influence their relations with the environment and through that environment personally change their behavior, subjugating it to their control.”

“Language is the tool of the tools.”

“Learning is more than the acquisition of the ability to think; it is the acquisition of many specialized abilities for thinking about a variety of things.”

“Love can reach the same level of talent, and even genius, as the discovery of differential calculus.”

“Pedagogy must be oriented not to the yesterday, but to the tomorrow of the child's development. Only then can it call to life in the process of education those processes of development which now lie in the zone of proximal development”

“People with great passions, people who accomplish great deeds, people who possess strong feelings, even people with great minds and a strong personality, rarely come out of good little boys and girls.”

“Somehow our society has formed a one-sided view of the human personality, and for some reason everyone understood giftedness and talent only as it applied to the intellect. But it is possible not only to be talented in one's thoughts but also to be talented in one's feelings as well.”

“The child begins to perceive the world not only through his [or her] eyes but also through his [or her] speech”

“The distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers”

“The individual becomes for himself what he is in himself through what he manifests for others.”

“The internalization of socially rooted historically developed activities is the distinguishing feature of human psychology.”

“The meaningful word is a microcosmos of human consciousness.”

“The most significant moment in the course of intellectual development, which gives birth to the purely human forms of practical and abstract intelligence, occurs when speech and practical activity, two previously completely independent lines of development, converge.”

“The only 'good' learning is that which is in advance of development.”

“The specifically human capacity for language enables children to provide for auxiliary tools in the solution of difficult tasks, to overcome impulsive action, to plan a solution to a problem prior to its execution, and to master their own behavior.”

“The teacher must adopt the role of facilitator not content provider.”

“The true direction of the development of thinking is not from the individual to the social, but from the social to the individual.”

“Thought is not merely expressed in words, it comes into existence through them”

“We are conscious of ourselves because we are conscious of others; and in an analogous manner, we are conscious of others because in our relationship to ourselves we are the same as others in their relationship to us. I am aware of myself only to the extent that I am as another for myself.”

“What a child can do today with assistance, she will be able to do by herself tomorrow.”

“It is through others that we become ourselves.”

“By giving our students practice in talking with others, we give them frames for thinking on their own.”