If all meanings could be adequately expressed by words, the arts of painting and music would not exist.
Interpretation
Words cannot fully capture the depth of human experience, hence the need for art and music.
John Dewey's quote highlights the limitations of language in conveying the full spectrum of human emotions and experiences. He suggests that if words were enough to express all meanings, there would be no necessity for the expressive arts such as painting and music, which serve to communicate feelings and ideas that go beyond verbal communication.
In practice
During an art exhibition, this quote can inspire discussion about the role of creativity.
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
You know, they ask me if I were on a desert island and I knew nobody would ever see what I wrote, would I go on writing. My answer is most emphatically yes. I would go on writing for company. Because I'm creating an imaginary - it's always imaginary - world in which I would like to live.
There are very few religious experiences that aren't explained using the vocabulary of light.
I really only take roles that I love and that I have some kind of innate compulsion or need to tell that story. Although it's almost like I have no control over it. It's like they choose me.
I've been blessed with enough wealth that I can make a film myself up to a certain budget. So one way I thought I would reinvent myself was just to make these very small, personal films that I've financed myself.
The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.
I have always thought of myself as a painter derailed by circumstance.
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