Complete adaptation to environment means death. The essential point in all response is the desire to control environment.
Interpretation
Adapting completely to one's surroundings can lead to a loss of self. The quest for control over our environment is fundamental to how we respond to it.
This quote by John Dewey emphasizes the idea that total adaptation to one's environment is detrimental to personal growth and identity. Rather than losing ourselves in conformity, it is important to engage with and strive to control our surroundings, as this desire fuels our responses and shapes our experiences. The struggle for control reflects our individual agency and the intrinsic human need to influence and create meaningful interactions with the world.
In practice
During a motivational speech about personal growth, I might reference this quote to highlight the importance of maintaining one's identity.
Every teacher should realize he is a social servant set apart for the maintenance of the proper social order and the securing of the right social growth. In this way, the teacher always is the prophet of the true God and the usherer-in of the true Kingdom of God.
Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.
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.
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.
Any genuine teaching will result, if successful, in someone's knowing how to bring about a better condition of things than existed earlier.
The reactionaries are in possession of force, in not only the army and police, but in the press and the schools
I don't believe there's an atom of meaning in it.
The crowning experience of all, for the homecoming man, is the wonderful feeling that, after all he has suffered, there is nothing he need fear anymore—except his God.
My diary seems to keep me whole.
The world changed from having the determinism of a clock to having the contingency of a pinball machine.
A man must know his destiny… if he does not recognize it, then he is lost. By this I mean, once, twice, or at the very most, three times, fate will reach out and tap a man on the shoulder… if he has the imagination, he will turn around and fate will point out to him what fork in the road he should take, if he has the guts, he will take it.
I wander though China. Without ever having boarded a plane. My travels take place here in the Tokoyo subways, in the backseat of a taxi... all of a sudden this city will start to go. In a flash, the buildings will crumble. Over the Tokyo streets will fall my China, like ash, leaching into everything it touches. Slowly, gradually, until nothing remains. No, this isn't a place for me.
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