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.

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