Explore Quotes by 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.

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.

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.

Method means that arrangement of subject matter which makes it most effective in use. Never is method something outside of the material.

Democracy is a form of government only because it is a form of moral and spiritual association.

It may be said that an education which does not succeed in making poetry a resource in the business of life as well as in its leisure, has something the matter with it.

All genuine education comes about through experience.

Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.

Things gain meaning by being used in a shared experience or joint action.

You cannot teach today the same way you did yesterday to prepare students for tomorrow.

The real purveyors of the news are artists, for artists are the ones who infuse fact with perception, emotion, and appreciation...We are beginning to realize that emotions and imagination are more potent in shaping public sentiment and opinion than information and reason.

Art is not the possession of the few who are recognized writers, painters, musicians; it is the authentic expression of any and all individuality.

The aim of education is growth: the aim of growth is more growth

Education is life itself.

The deepest urge in human nature is the desire to feel important.

In England, philosophers are honoured, respected; they rise to public offices, they are buried with the kings... In France warrants are issued against them, they are persecuted, pelted with pastoral letters: Do we see that England is any the worse for it?

Perhaps the greatest of all pedagogical fallacies is the notion that a person learns only the particular thing he is studying at the time.

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

We can have facts without thinking but we cannot have thinking without facts.

Every thinker puts some portion of an apparently stable world in peril.

Always make the other person feel important.