John Dewey > Quotes

“Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.”
― John Dewey

“Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination. ”
― John Dewey, The Quest for Certainty: A Study of the Relation of Knowledge and Action

“We only think when confronted with a problem.”
― John Dewey

“The self is not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation through choice of action.”
― John Dewey

“Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes.”
― John Dewey

“Scientific principles and laws do not lie on the surface of nature. They are hidden, and must be wrested from nature by an active and elaborate technique of inquiry. ”
― John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy

“There's all the difference in the world between having something to say, and having to say something.”
― John Dewey

“Hunger not to have, but to be”
― John Dewey

“For in spite of itself any movement that thinks and acts in terms of an ‘ism becomes so involved in reaction against other ‘isms that it is unwittingly controlled by them. For it then forms its principles by reaction against them instead of by a comprehensive, constructive survey of actual needs, problems, and possibilities.”
― John Dewey

“Were all instructors to realize that the quality of mental process, not the production of correct answers, is the measure of educative growth something hardly less than a revolution in teaching would be worked.”
― John Dewey, Democracy and Education

“Every one has experienced how learning an appropriate name for what was dim and vague cleared up and crystallized the whole matter. Some meaning seems distinct almost within reach, but is elusive; it refuses to condense into definite form; the attaching of a word somehow (just how, it is almost impossible to say) puts limits around the meaning, draws it out from the void, makes it stand out as an entity on its own account.”
― John Dewey, How We Think

“The path of least resistance and least trouble is a mental rut already made. It requires troublesome work to undertake the alteration of old beliefs. ”
― John Dewey

“Education is a social process; education is growth; education is not preparation for life but is life itself.”
― John Dewey

“There is no such thing as educational value in the abstract. The notion that some subjects and methods and that acquaintance with certain facts and truths possess educational value in and of themselves is the reason why traditional education reduced the material of education so largely to a diet of predigested materials.”
― John Dewey, Experience and Education

“To find out what one is fitted to do, and to secure an opportunity to do it, is the key to happiness.”
― John Dewey

“Conflict is the gadfly of thought. It stirs us to observation and memory. It instigates invention. It shocks us out of sheep-like passivity, and sets us at noting and contriving…conflict is a sine qua non of reflection and ingenuity.”
― John Dewey

“Faith in the possibilities of continued and rigorous inquiry does not limit access to truth to any channel or scheme of things. It does not first say that truth is universal and then add there is but one road to it.”
― John Dewey, A Common Faith

“Art is the most effective mode of communications that exists.”
― John Dewey

“We always live at the time we live and not at some other time, and only by extracting at each present time the full meaning of each present experience are we prepared for doing the same thing in the future.”
― John Dewey, Experience and Education

“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.”
― John Dewey

“Men have gone on to build up vast intellectual schemes, philosophies, and theologies, to prove that ideals are not real as ideals but as antecedently existing actualities. They have failed to see that in converting moral realities into matters of intellectual assent they have evinced lack of moral faith. Faith that something should be in existence as far as lies in our power is changed into the intellectual belief that it is already in existence. When physical existence does not bear out the assertion, the physical is subtly changed into the metaphysical. In this way, moral faith has been inextricably tied up with intellectual beliefs about the supernatural.”
― John Dewey, A Common Faith

“As we have seen there is some kind of continuity in any case since every experience affects for better or worse the attitudes which help decide the quality of further experiences, by setting up certain preference and aversion, and making it easier or harder to act for this or that end.”
― John Dewey

“Arriving at one goal is the starting point to another.”
― John Dewey, Democracy and Education

“The educational process has no end beyond itself; it is its own end.”
― John Dewey

“Forty years spent in wandering in a wilderness like that of the present is not a sad fate--unless one attempts to make himself believe that the wilderness is after all itself the promised land”
― John Dewey

“The only way to abolish war is to make peace seem heroic.”
― John Dewey

“a problem well put is half solved.”
― John Dewey

“Like the soil, mind is fertilized while it lies fallow, until a new burst of bloom ensues.”
― John Dewey, Art as Experience

“For, as I have suggested, disruption of the unity of the self is not limited to the cases that come to physicians and institutions for treatment. They accompany every disturbance of normal relations of husband and wife, parent and child, group and group, class and class, nation and nation. Emotional responses are so total as compared with the partial nature of intellectual responses, of ideas and abstract conceptions, that their consequences are more pervasive and enduring. I can, accordingly, think of nothing of greater practical importance than the psychic effects of human relationships, normal and abnormal, should be the object of continues study, including among the consequences the indirect somatic effects.” – The unity of the human being”
― John Dewey