Quotes from John Dewey

hear you don't believe I know enough to hold office. I wish you to understand that I am thinking about something or other most of the time.

Professed scientific philosophers have been wont to employ the remoter and refinished products of science in ways which deny, discount or pervert the obvious and immediate facts of gross experience, unmindful that thereby philosophy itself commits suicide.

In an experience, flow is from something to something. As one part leads into another and as one part carries on what went before, each gains distinctness in itself. The enduring whole is diversified by successive phases that are emphases of its varied colors.

Thinking is not a case of spontaneous combustion; it does not occur just on "general principles.

I question whether the spiritual life does not get its surest and most ample guarantees when it is learned that the laws and conditions of righteousness are implicated in the working processes of the universe; when it is found that man in his conscious struggles, in his doubts, temptations and defeats, in his aspirations and successes, is moved on and buoyed up by the forces which have developed nature.

Genuine ignorance is more profitable because likely to be accompanied by humility, curiosity, and open-mindedness; while ability to repeat catch-phrases, cant terms, familiar propositions, gives the conceit of learning and coats the mind with a varnish waterproof to new ideas.

Not perfection as a final goal, but the ever-enduring process of perfecting, maturing, refining is the aim of living.

Education is not preparation for life; it is life itself.

Art is the living and concrete proof that man is capable of restoring consciously, and thus on the plane of meaning, the union of sense, need, impulse and action characteristic of the live creature. The intervention of consciousness adds regulation, power of selection, and redisposition. Thus it varies the arts in ways without end. But its intervention also leads in time to the idea of art as a conscious idea—the greatest intellectual achievement in the history of humanity.

Although recognition of the fact still halts, because of traditions established before the power of art was adequately recognized, science itself is but a central art auxiliary to the generation and utilization of other arts.*

The psychologist, in his most remote and technical occupation with mechanism, is contributing his bit to that ordered knowledge which alone enables mankind to secure a larger and to direct a more equal flow of values in life.

Only in this connection of knowledge and social action can education generate the understanding... necessary for the continued existence of democracy.

Intelligence converts desire into plans, systematic plans based on assembling facts, reporting events as they happen, keeping tab on them and analyzing them.

The atomic doctrine with Democritus' thoroughgoing undertaking to substitute a quantitative185 for a qualitative conception of matter with the location of the qualitative aspects of the world in the experience of the soul appealed only to the Epicurean who used the theory as an exorcism to drive out of the universe the spirits which disturbed the calm of the philosopher.

Platon bir defas?nda köleyi baÅŸkalar?n?n amaçlar?n? gerçekleÅŸtiren kiÅŸi olarak tan?mlam??t?r ve daha önce belirttiÄŸimiz üzere kendi arzular?n?n tutsa?? olmuÅŸ bir kiÅŸi de asl?nda bir köledir.

But the live creature adopts its past; it can make friends with even its stupidities, using them as warnings that increase present wariness. Instead of trying to live upon whatever may have been achieved in the past, it uses past successes to inform the present. Every living experience owes its richness to what Santayana well calls "hushed reverberations.

The local is the only universal, upon that all art builds.

The interaction of knowledge and skills with experience is key to learning.

A problem properly stated is half solved.

Traditional education tended to ignore the importance of personal impulse and desire as moving springs. But this is no reason why progressive education should identify impulse and desire with purpose and thereby pass lightly over the need for careful observation, for wide range of information, and for judgment is students are to share in the formation of the purposes which activate them

Education is not a preparation for life; education is life itself

Strait-jacket and chain-gang procedures had to be done away with if there was to a chance for growth of individuals in the intellectual springs of freedom without which there is no assurance of genuine and continued normal growth.

Philosophy recovers itself when it ceases to be a device for dealing with the problems of philosophers and becomes a method, cultivated by philosophers, for dealing with the problems of men.

Morals concern nothing less than the whole character, and the whole character is identical with the man in all his concrete make-up and manifestations. To possess virtue does not signify to have cultivated a few namable and exclusive traits; it means to be fully and adequately what one is capable of becoming through association with others in all the offices of life. The moral and the social quality of conduct are, in the last analysis, identical with each other.