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.
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.
Thought is not merely expressed in words; it comes into existence through them.
The mind cannot be independent of the brain, but neither can it be reduced to it. Higher mental functions are formed by social means.
Related Quotes
Gradualness and discipline. This is the most important thing. From the very beginning of your work, train yourself to the strictest gradualness in accumulating knowledge.
-- Ivan Pavlov
Never think that you already know all. However highly you are appraised, always have the courage to say of yourself: I am ignorant.
-- Ivan Pavlov
Thought is not merely expressed in words; it comes into existence through them.
-- Lev Vygotsky
Only education is capable of saving our societies from possible collapse, whether violent, or gradual.
-- Jean Piaget