Thought is not merely expressed in words; it comes into existence through them.
Psychologists
Lev Vygotsky
Belarusian-born Soviet psychologist (1896-1934) sometimes called the Mozart of psychology. In barely a decade of active work he opened developmental psychology, education research, the psychology of art and defectology, and left behind three concepts that still organize the field — the zone of proximal development, cultural-historical activity theory, and inner speech as the bridge from outer dialogue to thought. He died of tuberculosis at thirty-seven. Stalin's regime banned his work from 1936 until 1956, and the global rediscovery that followed in the 1960s and 1970s, led from Cambridge, Massachusetts by Jerome Bruner and Michael Cole, makes him one of the most influential psychologists of the late twentieth century.
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Lev Vygotsky's Other Quotes
What a child can do today with assistance, she will be able to do by herself tomorrow.
Through others we become ourselves.
The mind cannot be independent of the brain, but neither can it be reduced to it. Higher mental functions are formed by social means.
This is the final thing I have done in psychology — and I will, like Moses, die at the summit, having glimpsed the promised land but without setting foot on it.
Related Quotes
Pure experience is the state of experience just as it is, with not the slightest addition of deliberative discrimination.
-- Kitarō Nishida
Being determines consciousness.
-- Karl Marx
Consciousness is always consciousness of something.
-- Edmund Husserl
Control of consciousness determines the quality of life.
-- Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
This is the final thing I have done in psychology — and I will, like Moses, die at the summit, having glimpsed the promised land but without setting foot on it.
-- Lev Vygotsky
Only education is capable of saving our societies from possible collapse, whether violent, or gradual.
-- Jean Piaget