Jerome Bruner > Quotes

“Being able to "go beyond the information" given to "figure things out" is one of the few untarnishable joys of life. One of the great triumphs of learning (and of teaching) is to get things organised in your head in a way that permits you to know more than you "ought" to. And this takes reflection, brooding about what it is that you know. The enemy of reflection is the breakneck pace - the thousand pictures.”
― Jerome S. Bruner, Acts of Meaning: Four Lectures on Mind and Culture

“We are storytelling creatures, and as children we acquire language to tell those stories that we have inside us.”
― Jerome Bruner

“In sum, then, "thinking about thinking" has to be a principal ingredient of any empowering practice of education.”
― Jerome S. Bruner, Acts of Meaning: Four Lectures on Mind and Culture

“Passion, like discriminating taste, grows on its use. You more likely act yourself into feeling than feel yourself into action.”
― Jerome Bruner

“Contrary to common sense there is no unique "real world" that pre-exists and is independent of human mental activity and human symbolic language; that which we call the world is a product of some mind whose symbolic procedures construct the world.”
― Jerome Bruner, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds

“Perhaps the most basic thing that can be said about human memory, after a century of intensive research, is that unless a detail is placed into a structured pattern, it is rapidly forgotten. Detailed material is conserved in memory by the use of simplified ways of representing it.”
― Jerome Bruner, The Process of Education

“You are more likely to act into feeling, than feeling yourself into action.”
― Jerome Bruner

“To get a general notion of a particular "Self" in practice, we must sample its uses in a variety of contexts, culturally specifiable contexts. [...] One viable alternative is obvious - to do the inquiry retrospectively, through autobiography. I mean, simply, an account of what one thinks one did in what settings in what ways for what felt reasons. It will inevitably be a narrative, its form will be as revealing as its substance. Our interest, rather, is only in what the person thought he did, what he thought he was doing it for, what kind of plights he thought he was in, and so on.”
― Jerome Bruner, Acts of Meaning

“You went to somewhere to do something with an anticipated goal in mind, something you couldn't do elsewhere and be the same Self.”
― Jerome Bruner, Acts of Meaning

“In answer to those who deny this version of selfhood on philosophical or "scientific" grounds, we reply simply, "But that's how it is: can't you see?”
― Jerome Bruner, Acts of Meaning: Four Lectures on Mind and Culture

“You more likely act yourself into feeling than feel yourself into action.”
― Jerome Bruner

“The central concept of a human psychology is meaning and the processes and transactions involved in the construction of meanings. To understand man you must understand how his experiences and his acts are shaped by his intentional states; the form of these intentional states is realized only through participation in the symbolic systems of the culture. Indeed, the very shape of our lives - the rough and perpetually changing draft of our autobiography that we carry in our minds - is understandable to ourselves and to others only by virtue of those cultural systems of interpretation. But culture is also constitutive of mind.”
― Jerome Bruner, Acts of Meaning

“I could not care less about the person's intention... The road to banality is paved with creative intentions.”
― Jerome Bruner, On Knowing: Essays for the Left Hand