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.
Interpretation
Luck can benefit intelligent individuals while avoiding those who lack insight.
This quote by John Dewey highlights the idea that luck is a presence in everyone's lives, but its favor often lies with those who are intelligent and able to take advantage of opportunities. It suggests that intelligence can help one navigate life's uncertainties and harness luck effectively, while ignorance may lead to missed chances and unfortunate outcomes.
In practice
Use this quote in a motivational speech to encourage students to value their education and intelligence.
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 βism becomes so involved in reaction against other βisms 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
There is no ideal world for you to wait around for. The world is always just what it is now, and it's up to you how you respond to it.
Tomorrow is the day when idlers work, and fools reform, and mortal men lay hold on heaven.
Of all the paths a man could strike into, there is, at any given moment, a best path .. A thing which, here and now, it were of all things wisest for him to do .. To find this path, and walk in it, is the one thing needful for him.
If there is a problem you can't solve, then there is an easier problem you can't solve: find it.
Pennies do not come from heaven. They have to be earned here on earth.
We alchemists look for talent that can heat up and change. Lukewarm won't do. Halfhearted holding back, well-enough getting by? Not here.
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