The self is not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation through choice of action.
Interpretation
The self is an evolving construct shaped by our actions and decisions.
John Dewey's quote emphasizes that our identity is not a fixed entity but rather a dynamic process that develops over time based on the choices we make and the actions we take. This perspective encourages reflection on how personal growth and self-understanding are continuously influenced by our experiences and decisions, suggesting that we have the power to shape who we are.
In practice
In a motivational speech about personal growth.
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
A poetess who had died young of cancer had said in one of her poems that for her, on sleepless nights, 'the night offers toads and black dogs and corpses of the drowned.
The mask was a thing on it's own, behind which Jack hid, liberated from shame and self-conciousness.
There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
"Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's and unto God the things which are God's." One would like to add: Give unto man things which are man's; give man his freedom and personality, his rights and religion.
Men do not care how nobly they live, but only how long, although it is within the reach of every man to live nobly, but within no man's power to live long.
Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void.
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