Famous John Dewey Quotations

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"The self is not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation through choice of action."
by John Dewey
"To find out what one is fitted to do, and to secure an opportunity to do it, is the key to happiness."
by John Dewey
"We cannot seek or attain health, wealth, learning, justice or kindness in general. Action is always specific, concrete, individualized, unique."
by John Dewey
"Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination."
by John Dewey
"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."
by John Dewey
"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."
by John Dewey
"Anyone who has begun to think places some portion of the world in jeopardy."
by John Dewey
"Children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society which is coming where everyone is interdependent."
by John Dewey
"Education is life itself."
by John Dewey
"Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes."
by John Dewey
"Intellectually, religious emotions are not creative but conservative. They attach themselves to the current view of the world and consecrate it."
by John Dewey
"Intellectually, religious emotions are not creative but conservative. They attach themselves readily to the current view of the world and consecrate it."
by John Dewey
"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."
by John Dewey
"Nature is the mother and the habitat of man, even if sometimes a stepmother and an unfriendly home."
by John Dewey
"Social engaged intellectuals must accept reality as they found it and shape it toward positive social goals, not stand aside in self-righteous isolation."
by John Dewey
"The good man is the man who, no matter how morally unworthy he has been, is moving to become better."
by John Dewey
"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."
by John Dewey
"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."
by John Dewey
"There is no discipline in the world so severe as the discipline of experience subjected to the tests of intelligent development and direction."
by John Dewey
"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."
by John Dewey
"Those outages were caused by separate equipment failures,"
by John Dewey
"We can have facts without thinking but we cannot have thinking without facts."
by John Dewey
"Complete adaptation to environment means death. The essential point in all response is the desire to control environment."
by John Dewey
"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."
by John Dewey
"Such happiness as life is capable of comes from the full participation of all our powers in the endeavor to wrest from each changing situations of experience its own full and unique meaning."
by John Dewey
"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."
by John Dewey
"The good society was, like the good self, a diverse yet harmonious, growing yet unified whole, a fully participatory democracy in which the powers and capacities of the individuals that comprised it were harmonized by their cooperative activities into a community that permitted the full and free expression of individuality."
by John Dewey
"Experiences in order to be educative must lead out into an expanding world of subject matter, a subject matter of facts or information and of ..."
by John Dewey
"It is part of the educator's responsibility to see equally to two things: First, that the problem grows out of the conditions of the experienc..."
by John Dewey
"The belief that all genuine education comes about through experience does not mean that all experiences are genuinely or equally educative."
by John Dewey
"There is, I think, no point in the philosophy of progressive education which is sounder than its emphasis upon the importance of the participa..."
by John Dewey


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