Vygotsky's Quotes & Sayings

Psychology teaches us at every step that though two types of activity can have the same external manifestation, whether in origin or essence, their nature may differ most profoundly. — Lev S. Vygotsky

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. — Lev S. Vygotsky

A word devoid of thought is a dead thing, and a thought unembodied in words remains a shadow. — Lev S. Vygotsky

What a child can do in cooperation today, he can do alone tomorrow. — Lev Vygotsky

A mind cannot be independent of culture. — Lev Vygotsky

The true direction of the development of thinking is not from the individual to the social, but from the social to the individual. — Lev S. Vygotsky

Love can reach the same level of talent, and even genius, as the discovery of differential calculus. — Lev Vygotsky

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. — Lev S. Vygotsky

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 — Lev S. Vygotsky

Experience teaches us that thought does not express itself in words, but rather realizes itself in them — Lev S. Vygotsky

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. — Lev Vygotsky

In play, the child is always behaving beyond his age, above his usual everyday behaviour; in play he is, as it were, a head above himself. Play contains in a concentrated form, as in the focus of a magnifying glass, all developmental tendencies; it is as if the child tries to jump above his usual level. — Lev S. Vygotsky

A child's greatest achievements are possible in play, achievements that tomorrow will become her basic level of real action. — Lev Vygotsky

What children can do with the assistance of others might be in some sense even more indicative of their mental development than what they can do alone — Lev S. Vygotsky

The teacher must adopt the role of facilitator not content provider. — Lev S. Vygotsky

Human learning presupposes a specific social nature and a process by which children grow into the intellectual life of those around them — Lev S. Vygotsky

In play, a child is always above his average age, above his daily behavior; in play, it is as though he were a head taller than himself. — Lev Vygotsky

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. — Lev S. Vygotsky

Language is the tool of the tools — Lev S. Vygotsky

The only 'good' learning is that which is in advance of development. — Lev S. Vygotsky

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. — Lev S. Vygotsky

The child begins to perceive the world not only through his [or her] eyes but also through his [or her] speech — Lev S. Vygotsky

Writing should be meaningful for children, Y an intrinsic need should be aroused in them, and Y writing should be incorporated into a task that is necessary and relevant. — Lev S. Vygotsky

Play continually creates demands on the child to act against immediate impulse, i.e., to act according to the line of greatest resistance. — Lev S. Vygotsky

It is through others that we become ourselves. — Lev S. Vygotsky

Thought is not merely expressed in words, it comes into existence through them — Lev S. Vygotsky

Internal and external action are inseparable: imagination, interpretation, and will are internal processes in external action. — Lev S. Vygotsky

Through others we become ourselves. — Lev S. Vygotsky

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. — Lev Vygotsky

By giving our students practice in talking with others, we give them frames for thinking on their own. — Lev S. Vygotsky

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. — Lev S. Vygotsky

GENERAL BOOKS ABOUT LANGUAGE Highly readable, witty, and provocative is Roger Brown's Words and Things. Also readable, magnificent, though sometimes too dogmatic, is Eric H. Lenneberg's Biological Foundations of Language. The deepest and most beautiful explorations of all are to be found in L. S. Vygotsky's Thought and Language, originally published in Russian, posthumously, in 1934, and later translated by Eugenia Hanfmann and Gertrude Vahar. Vygotsky has been described - not unjustly - as "the Mozart of psychology." A personal favorite of mine is Joseph Church's Language and the Discovery of Reality: A Developmental Psychology of Cognition, a book one goes back to again and again. — Oliver Sacks

There is reason to believe that voluntary activity, more than highly developed intellect, distinguishes humans from the animals which stand closest to them. — Lev S. Vygotsky

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. — Lev S. Vygotsky

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. — Lev S. Vygotsky

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 — Lev S. Vygotsky

What a child can do today with assistance, she will be able to do by herself tomorrow. — Lev S. Vygotsky

Lev Vygotsky, the great Russian psychologist, used to speak of "thinking in pure meanings." I cannot decide whether this is nonsense or profound truth - it is the sort of reef I end up on when I think about thinking. — Oliver Sacks