John Dewey > Quotes

“We do not learn from experience... we learn from reflecting on experience.”
― John Dewey

“Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.”
― John Dewey

“Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes.”
― John Dewey

“Give the pupils something to do, not something to learn; and the doing is of such a nature as to demand thinking; learning naturally results.”
― John Dewey

“A problem well put is half solved.”
― John Dewey

“We only think when confronted with a problem.”
― John Dewey

“The self is not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation through choice of action.”
― John Dewey

“Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination. ”
― John Dewey, The Quest for Certainty: A Study of the Relation of Knowledge and Action

“If we teach today’s students as we taught yesterday’s, we rob them of tomorrow.”
― John Dewey

“Hunger not to have, but to be”
― 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.”
― John Dewey, Democracy and Education

“There's all the difference in the world between having something to say, and having to say something.”
― John Dewey

“Art is the most effective mode of communications that exists.”
― john dewey

“Education is a social process; education is growth; education is not preparation for life but is life itself.”
― John Dewey

“The good man is the man who, no matter how morally unworthy he has been, is moving to become better.”
― John Dewey

“The deepest urge in human nature is the desire to be important.”
― John Dewey

“The most important attitude that can be formed is that of desire to go on learning.”
― John Dewey, Experience and Education

“To find out what one is fitted to do, and to secure an opportunity to do it, is the key to happiness.”
― 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, Reconstruction in Philosophy

“To me faith means not worrying”
― John Dewey

“For in spite of itself any movement that thinks and acts in terms of an ‘ism becomes so involved in reaction against other ‘isms 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.”
― John Dewey

“The path of least resistance and least trouble is a mental rut already made. It requires troublesome work to undertake the alteration of old beliefs. ”
― 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.”
― John Dewey, Experience and Education

“There is no such thing as educational value in the abstract. The notion that some subjects and methods and that acquaintance with certain facts and truths possess educational value in and of themselves is the reason why traditional education reduced the material of education so largely to a diet of predigested materials.”
― John Dewey, Experience and Education

“The only way to abolish war is to make peace seem heroic.”
― John Dewey

“Every one has experienced how learning an appropriate name for what was dim and vague cleared up and crystallized the whole matter. Some meaning seems distinct almost within reach, but is elusive; it refuses to condense into definite form; the attaching of a word somehow (just how, it is almost impossible to say) puts limits around the meaning, draws it out from the void, makes it stand out as an entity on its own account.”
― John Dewey, How We Think

“Arriving at one goal is the starting point to another.”
― John Dewey, Democracy and Education

“Conflict is the gadfly of thought. It stirs us to observation and memory. It instigates invention. It shocks us out of sheep-like passivity, and sets us at noting and contriving…conflict is a sine qua non of reflection and ingenuity.”
― John Dewey

“The educational process has no end beyond itself; it is its own end.”
― John Dewey

“The only freedom that is of enduring importance is the freedom of intelligence, that is to say, freedom of observation and of judgment, exercised in behalf of purposes that are intrinsically worth while. The commonest mistake made about freedom is, I think, to identify it with freedom of movement, or, with the external or physical side of activity.”
― John Dewey