Explore Quotes by John Dewey

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

Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes.

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

Education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living.

Arriving at one goal is the starting point to another.

The good man is the man who, no matter how morally unworthy he has been, is moving to become better.

To find out what one is fitted to do, and to secure an opportunity to do it, is the key to happiness.

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

The plea for the predominance of learning to read in early school life because of the great importance attaching to literature seems to be a perversion.

Purposeful action is thus the goal of all that is truly educative.

Talk of democracy has little content when big business rules the life of the country through its control of the means of production, exchange, the press and other means of publicity, propaganda and communication.

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.

Every serious-minded person knows that a large part of the effort required in moral discipline consists in the courage needed to acknowledge the unpleasant consequences of one's past and present acts.

It science involves an intelligent and persistent endeavor to revise current beliefs so as to weed out what is erroneous, to add to their accuracy, and, above all, to give them such shape that the dependencies of the various facts upon one another may be as obvious as possible.

The empiric easily degenerates into the quack. He does not know where his knowledge begins or leaves off, and so when he gets beyond routine conditions he begins to pretend-to make claims for which there is no justification, and to trust to luck and to ability to impose upon others-to "bluff."

We have already noticed the difference in the attitude of a spectator and of an agent or participant. The former is indifferent to what is going on; one result is just as good as another, since each is just something to look at. The latter is bound up with what is going on; its outcome makes a difference to him.

You can teach students to develop the ability to think reflectively, and you can help them understand what this means, but if they are not inclined to do so they never will.

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

The devotion of democracy to education is a familiar fact. . . . [A] government resting upon popular suffrage cannot be successful unless those who elect . . . their governors are educated.

The future of religion is connected with the possibility of developing a faith in the possibilities of human experience and human relationships that will create a vital sense of the solidarity of human interests and inspire action to make that sense a reality.

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