Complete adaptation to environment means death. The essential point in all response is the desire to control environment.
—John Dewey
Topics: Nature
The intellectual content of religions has always finally adapted itself to scientific and social conditions after they have become clear… . For this reason I do not think that those who are concerned about the future of a religious attitude should trouble themselves about the conflict of science with traditional doctrines.
—John Dewey
Topics: Science, Religion
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. Self-conceit often regards it as a sign of weakness to admit that a belief to which we have once committed ourselves is wrong. We get so identified with an idea that it is literally a “pet” notion and we rise to its defense and stop our eyes and ears to anything different.
—John Dewey
Topics: Habits, Choice
We cannot seek or attain health, wealth, learning, justice or kindness in general. Action is always specific, concrete, individualized, unique.
—John Dewey
Topics: Wealth, Justice, Action
A problem defined is half solved.
—John Dewey
Topics: Creativity
To the being of fully alive, the future is not ominous but a promise; it surrounds the present like a halo.
—John Dewey
Topics: Tomorrow, The Future
Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.
—John Dewey
Topics: Courage, Scientists, Imagination, Science
What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child that must the community want for all its children.
—John Dewey
Topics: Children
Creative thinking will improve as we relate the new fact to the old and all facts to each other.
—John Dewey
Topics: Facts
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
Topics: Luck
The result of the educative process is capacity for further education.
—John Dewey
Topics: Education
As long as art is the beauty parlor of civilization, neither art nor civilization is secure.
—John Dewey
Topics: Civilization
To find out what one is fitted to do, and to secure an opportunity to do it, is the key to happiness.
—John Dewey
Topics: Work, Talents, Happiness, Abilities
Search for a single, inclusive good is doomed to failure. Such happiness as life is capable of comes from the full participation of all our powers in the endeavor to wrest from each changing situation of experience its own full and unique meaning.
—John Dewey
Topics: Happiness
The good man is the man who, no matter how morally unworthy he has been, is moving to become better.
—John Dewey
Topics: Progress, Self-improvement
Confidence … is directness and courage in meeting the facts of life.
—John Dewey
Topics: Courage, Confidence, Assurance, Life
When men think and believe in one set of symbols and act in ways which are contrary to their professed and conscious ideas, confusion and insincerity are bound to result.
—John Dewey
Topics: Hypocrisy
There is all the difference in the world between having something to say and having to say something.
—John Dewey
Topics: Communication
Philosophy recovers itself when it ceases to be the device for dealing with the problems of philosophers and becomes the method, cultivated by philosophers, for dealing with the problems of men.
—John Dewey
Topics: Philosophy
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.
—John Dewey
Topics: Community, Communication
We only think when we are confronted with a problem.
—John Dewey
Topics: Challenges, Adversity, Difficulties, Problems
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.
—John Dewey
Topics: Society
Education is a social process. Education is growth. Education is, not a preparation for life; education is life itself.
—John Dewey
Topics: Education
The intimation never wholly deserts us that there is, in the unformed activities of childhood and youth, the possibilities of a better life for the community as well as for individuals here and there. This dim sense is the ground of our abiding idealization of childhood.
—John Dewey
Topics: Children
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
Topics: Education
Time and memory are true artists; they remould reality nearer to the heart’s desire.
—John Dewey
Topics: Reality
The outstanding problem of the Public is discovery and identification of itself.
—John Dewey
Topics: Problems
Arriving at one goal is the starting point to another.
—John Dewey
Topics: Goal, Success, Change, Goals
Modern life means democracy, democracy means freeing intelligence for independent effectivenessthe emancipation of mind as an individual organ to do its own work. We naturally associate democracy, to be sure, with freedom of action, but freedom of action without freed capacity of thought behind it is only chaos.
—John Dewey
Conflict is the gadfly of thought. It stirs us to observation and memory. It instigates to invention. It shocks us out of sheeplike passivity, and sets us at noting and contriving.
—John Dewey
Topics: Conflict, Anger
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- William James American Philosopher
- Charles Sanders Peirce American Philosopher
- Mortimer J. Adler American Philosopher, Educator
- George Santayana Spanish-American Poet, Philosopher
- Eric Hoffer American Philosopher
- Carl Rogers American Psychologist
- Nicholas Murray Butler American Philosopher
- Will Durant American Historian, Philosopher
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau French Philosopher
- Robert Maynard Hutchins American Author, Academic
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