John Dewey Quotes

347 Sourced Quotes

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

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

John Dewey
Failure is not mere failure. It is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes.

John Dewey
To regiment artists, to make them servants of some particular cause does violence to the very springs of artistic creation. But it does more than that. It betrays the very cause of a better future it would serve, for in its subjugation of the individuality of the artist it annihilates the source of that which is genuinely new. Where the regimentation is successful, it would cause the future to be but a rearrangement of the past.

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.

John Dewey
Knowledge falters when imagination clips its wings or fears to use them.

John Dewey
The first distinguishing characteristic of thinking is facing the facts — inquiry, minute and extensive scrutinizing, observation.

John Dewey
Human nature exists and operates in an environment. And it is not 'in' that environment as coins are in a box, but as a plant is in the sunlight and soil.

John Dewey
That the ulterior significance of every mode of human association lies in the contribution which it makes to the improvement of the quality of experience is a fact most easily recognized in dealing with the immature.

John Dewey
A society which makes provision for participation in its good of all its members on equal terms and which secures flexible readjustment of its institutions through interaction of the different forms of associated life is in so far democratic. Such a society must have a type of education which gives individuals a personal interest in social relationships and control, and the habits of mind which secure social changes without introducing disorder.

John Dewey
The most important attitude that can be formed is that of desire to go on learning.

John Dewey
Men's fundamental attitudes toward the world are fixed by the scope and qualities of the activities in which they partake.

John Dewey
Education is not an affair of 'telling' and being told, but an active and constructive process.

John Dewey
To be a recipient of a communication is to have an enlarged and changed experience. One shares in what another has thought and felt and in so far, meagerly or amply, has his own attitude modified.

John Dewey
A being connected with other beings cannot perform his own activities without taking the activities of others into account. For they are the indispensable conditions of the realization of his tendencies. When he moves he stirs them and reciprocally.

John Dewey
The most important factor in the training of good mental habits consists in acquiring the attitude of suspended conclusion, and in mastering the various methods of searching for new materials to corroborate or to refute the first suggestions that occur.

John Dewey
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.

John Dewey
Thinking is the accurate and deliberate instituting of connections between what is done and its consequences.

John Dewey
The life of the ancient Greeks and Romans has profoundly influenced our own, and yet the ways in which they affect us do not present themselves on the surface of our ordinary experiences.

John Dewey
Understanding one another means that objects, including sounds, have the same value for both with respect to carrying on a common pursuit.

John Dewey
It is a familiar and significant saying that a problem well put is half-solved.

John Dewey
The experience has to be formulated in order to be communicated.

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
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.

John Dewey
Such words as "society" and "community" are likely to be misleading, for they have a tendency to make us think there is a single thing corresponding to the single word.

John Dewey