John Dewey

If all meanings could be adequately expressed by words, the arts of painting and music would not exist.

Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.

Complete adaptation to environment means death. The essential point in all response is the desire to control environment.

From the standpoint of the child, the great waste in the school comes from his inability to utilize the experiences he gets outside the school in any complete and free way within the school itself; while, on the other hand, he is unable to apply in daily life what he is learning at school. That is the isolation of the school — its isolation from life.

What, after all, is the public under present conditions? What are the reasons for its eclipse? What hinders it from finding and identifying itself? By what means shall its inchoate and amorphous estate be organized into effective political action relevant to present social needs and opportunities? What has happened to the public in the century and a half since the theory of political democracy was urged with such assurance and hope?

...the moment of passage from disturbance into harmony is that of intensest life.

All learning begins when our comfortable ideas turn out to be inadequate.

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

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.

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

Always make the other person feel important.

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.

One lives with so many bad deeds on one's conscience and some good intentions in one's heart.

Just as a flower which seems beautiful and has color but no perfume, so are the fruitless words of the man who speaks them but does them not.

Anyone who has begun to think, places some portion of the world in jeopardy.

Skepticism: the mark and even the pose of the educated mind.

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

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.

An idea is a method of evading, circumventing or surmounting through reflection, obstacles that otherwise would have to be attacked by brute force.

In the present state of the world, it is evident that the control we have gained of physical energies, heat, light, electricity, etc., without having first secured control of our use of ourselves is a perilous affair. Without the control of our use of ourselves, our use of other things is blind; it may lead to anything.

Knowledge is no longer an immobile solid; it has been liquefied. it is actively moving in all the currents of society itself