John Dewey Quotes

Man lives in a world of surmise, of
mystery, of uncertainties.
Nature is the mother and the habitat of man, even if sometimes a
stepmother and an unfriendly home.
No man's credit is as good as his money.
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.
One lives with so many bad deeds on one's conscience and some good
intentions in one's heart.
Skepticism: the mark and even the pose of the educated mind. Anyone
who
has begun to think, places some portion of the world in jeopardy.
The good man is the man who, no matter how morally unworthy he has
been, is moving to become better.
The self is not something ready-made, but something in continuous
formation through choice of action.
Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.
It is a familiar and significant saying that a problem well put is
half-solved. To me faith means not worrying.
Genuine ignorance is profitable because it is likely to be
accompanied
by humility, curiosity, and open mindedness; whereas ability to
repeat
catch-phrases, cant terms, familiar propositions, gives the conceit
of
learning and coats the mind with varnish waterproof to new ideas.
We only think when we are confronted with problems.
Every thinker puts some portion of an apparently stable world in
peril
and no one can wholly predict what will emerge in its place.
Without some goals and some efforts to reach it, no man can live.
Intellectually, religious emotions are not creative but
conservative.
They attach themselves readily to the current view of the world and
consecrate it.
Confidence ... is directness and courage in meeting the
facts of life.
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.
Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of
imagination.
To the being of fully alive, the future is not ominous but a
promise;
it surrounds the present like a halo.
Give the pupils something to do, not something to learn; and the
doing
is of such a nature as to demand thinking; learning naturally
results.
We cannot seek or attain health, wealth, learning, justice or
kindness
in general. Action is always specific, concrete, individualized,
unique.
There is no
discipline in the world so severe as the discipline of
experience subjected to the tests of intelligent development and
direction.
Complete adaptation to environment means death. The essential point
in
all response is the desire to control environment.
We can have facts without thinking but we cannot have thinking
without
facts.
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 attitude toward your
experience
changing.
Democracy means the belief that humanistic culture should prevail.
To find out what one is fitted to do, and to secure an opportunity
to
do it, is the key to happiness.
John
Dewey Philosophy
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