John Dewey

One lives with so many bad deeds on one's conscience and some good intentions in one's heart.

To me faith means not worrying.

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

The self is not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation through choice of action.

Insight into soul-action, ability to discriminate the genuine from the sham and capacity to further one and discourage the other.

We can have facts without thinking but we cannot have thinking without facts.

Education is not preparation for life education is life itself.

Without some goals and some efforts to reach it, no man can live.

The self is not something ready made but something in continuous formation through choice of action.

Just as a flower which seems beautiful and has color but no perfume, so are the fruitless words of the man who speaks them but does them not.

Art is not the possession of the few who are recognized writers, painters, musicians; it is the authentic expression of any and all individuality.

Any genuine teaching will result, if successful, in someone's knowing how to bring about a better condition of things than existed earlier.

Arriving at one goal is the starting point to another.

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.

We only think when we are confronted with problems.

Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes.

The belief that all genuine education comes about through experience does not mean that all experiences are genuinely or equally educative.

Man is not logical and his intellectual history is a record of mental reserves and compromises. He hangs on to what he can in his old beliefs even when he is compelled to surrender their logical basis.

Nature is the mother and the habitat of man even if sometimes a stepmother and an unfriendly home.

Time and memory are true artists; they remould reality nearer to the heart's desire.

Nature is the mother and the habitat of man, even if sometimes a stepmother and an unfriendly home.

Luck, bad if not good, will always be with us. But it has a way of favoring the intelligent and showing its back to the stupid.

Anyone who has begun to think, places some portion of the world in jeopardy.

Such happiness as life is capable of comes from the full participation of all our powers in the endeavor to wrest from each changing situations of experience its own full and unique meaning.

Man lives in a world of surmise, of mystery, of uncertainties.

Intellectually religious emotions are not creative but conservative. They attach themselves readily to the current view of the world and consecrate it.

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.

Skepticism, the mark and even the pose of the educated mind.

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

Without some goals and some efforts to reach it no man can live.

Conflict is the gadfly of thought. It stirs us to observation and memory. It instigates to invention. It shocks us out of sheeplike passivity and sets us at noting and contriving.

Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.

By object is meant some element in the complex whole that is defined in abstraction from the whole of which it is a distinction.

Skepticism: the mark and even the pose of the educated mind.

To find out what one is fitted to do, and to secure an opportunity to do it, is the key to happiness.

To savages it would seem preposterous to seek out a place where nothing but learning was going on in order that one might learn.

Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.

Collateral learning in the way of formation of enduring attitudes of likes and dislikes may be and often is much more important than the spelling lesson or lesson in geography or history that is learned.

No man's credit is as good as his money.

Cooperation called fraternity in the classic French formula is as much a part of the democratic ideal as is personal initiative. That cultural conditions were allowed to develop markedly so in the economic phase which subordinated cooperativeness to liberty and equality serves to explain the decline in the two latter.

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

Education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living.

Skeptics are generally ready to believe anything, provided is it only sufficiently improbable; it is at matters of fact that such people stumble.

If we teach today's students as we taught yesterday's, we rob them of tomorrow.

No mans credit is as good as his money.

Things gain meaning by being used in a shared experience or joint action.