Lev Vygotsky Quotes

Through others we become ourselves.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

Internal and external action are inseparable: imagination, interpretation, and will are internal processes in external action.

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.

Art is the collectivisation of feeling.

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.

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.

En ausencia de un sistema de signos lingüísticos u otros, sólo es posible el más primitivo y limitado' tipo de comunicación; ésta, que se manifiesta por medio de movimientos expresivos, observados fundamentalmente entre los animales, no es tanto comunicación como expresión de afecto.

En ausencia de un sistema de signos lingüísticos u otros, solo es posible el más primitivo y limitado tipo de comunicación"; ésta, que se manifiesta por medio de movimientos expresivos, observados fundamentalmente entre los animales, no es tanto comunicación como expresión de afectos. (pag. 12-cap. 1)

Consciousness is reflected in the word like the sun in a drop of water. Lev Vygotsky--Thought and Language

In play, rule becomes affect

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. Farewell, dear creations. The rest is silence.

In the 1930s, the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky observed that inner speech is accompanied by tiny muscular movements in the larynx. Based on this, he argued that inner speech developed through the internalization of out-loud speech. In the 1990s, neuroscientists confirmed his view; they used neuroimaging to demonstrate that areas of the brain such as the left inferior frontal gyrus, which are active when we speak out loud, are also active during inner speech. That voice inside your head truly is your brain talking, even though you’re the only one who can hear it.

En ausencia de un sistema de signos lingüísticos u otros, solo es posible el más primitivo y limitado tipo de comunicación; ésta, que se manifiesta por medio de movimientos expresivos, observados fundamentalmente entre los animales, no es tanto comunicación como expresión de afectos. (pag. 12-cap. 1)

Our verbal development goes hand in hand with our emotional development. As toddlers, speaking to ourselves out loud helps us learn to control ourselves. In the early twentieth century, the Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky was one of the first people to explore the connection between language development and self-control. He was interested in the curious behavior of children who talk to themselves out loud, coaching themselves along while also doling out self-critiques. As anyone who has spent significant time around kids knows, they often have full-blown, unprompted conversations with themselves. This isn’t just play or imagination; it’s a sign of neural and emotional growth.

A mind cannot be independent of culture.

The idea of inner speech was made famous by the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky. He noted that it is not quite the same thing as ordinary spoken language, as it is not as formal or rigid. Vygotsky was interested in how children acquire and use inner speech in the process of cognitive development. As explained by Oliver Sacks in Seeing Voices, “It is through inner speech that the child develops his own concepts and meanings; it is through inner speech that he achieves his own identity; it is through inner speech, finally, that he constructs his own world.” Language and deliberative thought, and even consciousness, are closely entwined.