John Dewey Quotes (53 Quotes)

Anyone who has begun to think, places some portion of the world in jeopardy.

Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.

The only freedom that is of enduring importance is the freedom of intelligence, that is to say, freedom of observation and of judgment, exercised in behalf of purposes that are intrinsically worth while. The commonest mistake made about freedom is, I think, to identify it with freedom of movement, or, with the external or physical side of activity.

What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all its children.

Skepticism: the mark and even the pose of the educated mind.

Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.

Man lives in a world of surmise, of mystery, of uncertainties.

Just as a flower which seems beautiful and has color but no perfume, so are the fruitless words of the man who speaks them but does them not.

By object is meant some element in the complex whole that is defined in abstraction from the whole of which it is a distinction.

We eat out all the time, and you have no idea what you're eating.

The belief that all genuine education comes about through experience does not mean that all experiences are genuinely or equally educative.

I believe that the only true education comes through the stimulation of the child's powers by the demands of the social situations in which he finds himself.

Every thinker puts some portion of an apparently stable world in peril.

Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes.

One lives with so many bad deeds on one's conscience and some good intentions in one's heart.

Luck, bad if not good, will always be with us. But it has a way of favoring the intelligent and showing its back to the stupid.

Education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living.

The self is not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation through choice of action.

The religious is any activity pursued in behalf of an ideal end against obstacles and in spite of threats of personal loss because of its general and enduring value.

To find out what one is fitted to do, and to secure an opportunity to do it, is the key to happiness.

It (modern philosophy) certainly exacts a surrender of all supernaturalism and fixed dogma and rigid institutionalism with which Christianity has been historically associated

The very problem of mind and body suggests division I do not know of anything so disastrously affected by the habit of division as this particular theme. In its discussion are reflected the splitting off from each other of religion, morals and science the divorce of philosophy from science and of both from the arts of conduct. The evils which we suffer in education, in religion, in the materialism of business and the aloofness of intellectuals from life, in the whole separation of knowledge and practice -- all testify to the necessity of seeing mind-body as an integral whole.

To me faith means not worrying.

There is nothing left worth preserving in the notions of unseen powers, controlling human destiny, to which obedience and worship are due

No man's credit is as good as his money.

Intellectually, religious emotions are not creative but conservative. They attach themselves readily to the current view of the world and consecrate it.

The good man is the man who, no matter how morally unworthy he has been, is moving to become better.

The end justifies the means only when the means used are such as actually bring about the desired and desirable end.

By reading the characteristic features of any man's castles in the air you can make a shrewd guess as to his underlying desires which are frustrated.

Complete adaptation to environment means death. The essential point in all response is the desire to control environment.

When men think and believe in one set of symbols and act in ways which are contrary to their professed and conscious ideas, confusion and insincerity are bound to result

The path of least resistance and least trouble is a mental rut already made. It requires troublesome work to undertake the alternation of old beliefs.

Nature is the mother and the habitat of man, even if sometimes a stepmother and an unfriendly home.

There is more than a verbal tie between the words common, community, and communication. Try the experiment of communicating, with fullness and accuracy, some experience to another, especially if it be somewhat complicated, and you will find your own.

The future of religion is connected with the possibility of developing a faith in the possibilities of human experience and human relationships that will create a vital sense of the solidarity of human interests and inspire action to make that sense a reality.

The deepest urge in human nature is the desire to be important

Arriving at one goal is the starting point to another.

Conflict is the gadfly of thought. It stirs us to observation and memory. It instigates to invention. It shocks us out of sheep like passivity, and sets us at noting and contriving.

We only think when we are confronted with problems.

Without some goals and some efforts to reach it, no man can live.

A democracy is more than a form of government it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience

The reactionaries are in possession of force, in not only the army and police, but in the press and the schools.

We naturally associate democracy, to be sure, with freedom of action, but freedom of action without freed capacity of thought behind it is only chaos.

Time and memory are true artists; they remould reality nearer to the heart's desire.

Man is not logical and his intellectual history is a record of mental reserves and compromises. He hangs on to what he can in his old beliefs even when he is compelled to surrender their logical basis.

The outstanding problem of the Public is discovery and identification of itself

It is our American habit if we find the foundations of our educational structure unsatisfactory to add another story or wing. We find it easier to add a new study or course or kind of school than to recognize existing conditions so as to meet the need.

Every serious-minded person knows that a large part of the effort required in moral discipline consists in the courage needed to acknowledge the unpleasant consequences of one's past and present acts.

For one man who thanks God that he is not as other men there are a thousand to offer thanks that they are as other men, sufficiently as others are to escape attention.

Education is a regulation of the process of coming to share in the social consciousness and that the adjustment of individual activity on the basis of this social consciousness is the only sure method of social reconstruction.