Developmental scientists like me explore the basic science of learning by designing controlled experiments.

I'm afraid the parenting advice to come out of developmental psychology is very boring: pay attention to your kids and love them.

Because we imagine, we can have invention and technology. It's actually play, not necessity, that is the mother of invention.

What's it like to be a baby? It's like being in love in Paris for the first time after you've had three double espressos.

Adults often assume that most learning is the result of teaching and that exploratory, spontaneous learning is unusual. But actually, spontaneous learning is more fundamental.

The more obsessively we focus on what a particular food is going to do for us, the less healthy we've become. Simple pleasures become complicated.

The brain is highly structured, but it is also extremely flexible. It's not a blank slate, but it isn't written in stone, either.

Animals are certainly more sophisticated than we used to think. And we shouldn't lump together animals as a group. Crows and chimps and dogs are all highly intelligent in very different ways.

The largest and most powerful computers are still no match for the smallest and weakest humans.

Babies and young children are like the research and development division of the human species, and we grown-ups are production and marketing.

What teenagers want most of all are social rewards, especially the respect of their peers.

We are overhasty to speak as if God did not manifest himself by our silent feeling, and make his love felt through ours.

What I do know is that there are two kinds of pain in this life: risk and regret. I'd rather live with the first than the second.

This is love if it's not with you, a terrible fiery something that makes people look away, and it feels like a punch in the throat.

It is the Christmas time: And up and down 'twixt heaven and earth, In glorious grief and solemn mirth, The shining angels climb.

Persistence may not solve everything - at least in our lifetime - but it is truer to the meaning of life for us to wait for another plowing, another seeding, another harvest, then not.

Our conjectures pass upon us for truths; we will know what we do not know, and often, what we cannot know: so mortifying to our pride is the base suspicion of ignorance.

The truth hurts like a thorn at first; but in the end it blossoms like a rose.

It really takes growing up to treasure the specialness of being different.

That's the curse of the reading class. We can be seduced by a good story even at the most inopportune moments.

First get an absolute conquest over thyself, and then thou wilt easily govern thy wife.