John Dewey quotes

John Dewey was an influential American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer. His work laid the foundation for progressive education and emphasized learning through experience. He became a leading voice in promoting democracy, critical thinking, and active participation in education. Here are 84 of his quotes:

Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination. (John Dewey)
The good man is the man who, no matter how morally unworthy he has been, is moving to become better. View quote
John Dewey
The path of least resistance and least trouble is a mental rut already made. It requires troublesome work to undertake the alternation of old beliefs. View quote
John Dewey
The self is not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation through choice of action. View quote
John Dewey
We only think when confronted with a problem. View quote
John Dewey
Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself. View quote
John Dewey
Arriving at one goal is the starting point to another. View quote
John Dewey
To find out what one is fitted to do, and to secure an opportunity to do it, is the key to happiness. View quote
John Dewey
Without some goals and some efforts to reach it, no man can live. View quote
John Dewey
There's all the difference in the world between having something to say, and having to say something. View quote
John Dewey
If we teach today's students as we taught yesterday's, we rob them of tomorrow. (John Dewey)
To me faith means not worrying. View quote
John Dewey
We always live at the time we live and not at some other time, and only by extracting at each present time the full meaning of each present experience are we prepared for doing the same thing in the future. View quote
John Dewey
Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes. View quote
John Dewey
Were all instructors to realize that the quality of mental process, not the production of correct answers, is the measure of educative growth something hardly less than a revolution in teaching would be worked. View quote
John Dewey
Art is the most effective mode of communications that exists. View quote
John Dewey
Man lives in a world of surmise, of mystery, of uncertainties. View quote
John Dewey
Every thinker puts some portion of an apparently stable world in peril and no one can wholly predict what will emerge in its place. View quote
John Dewey
As long as politics is the shadow cast on society by big business, the attenuation of the shadow will not change the substance. View quote
John Dewey
a problem well put is half solved. View quote
John Dewey
Scientific principles and laws do not lie on the surface of nature. They are hidden, and must be wrested from nature by an active and elaborate technique of inquiry. (John Dewey)
Democracy means the belief that humanistic culture should prevail. View quote
John Dewey
Legislation is a matter of more or less intelligent improvisation aiming at palliating conditions by means of patchwork policies. View quote
John Dewey
But the individual butterfly or earthquake remains just the unique existence which it is. We forget in explaining its occurrence that it is only the occurrence that is explained, not the thing itself. View quote
John Dewey
...classic philosophy maintained that change, and consequently time, are marks of inferior reality, holding that true and ultimate reality is immutable and eternal. Human reasons, all too human, have given birth to the idea that over and beyond the lower realm of things that shift like the sands on the seashore there is the kingdom of the unchanging, of the complete, the perfect. The grounds for the belief are couched in the technical language of philosophy, but the grounds for the cause is the heart's desire for surcease from change, struggle, and uncertainty. The eternal and immutable is the consummation of mortal man's quest for certainty. View quote
John Dewey