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Communication
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There is more than a verbal tie between the words common, community, and communication. Try the experiment of communicating, with fullness and accuracy, some experience to another, especially if it be somewhat complicated, and you will find your own attitude toward your experience changing.
-John Dewey
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Discipline
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A person who is trained to consider his actions, to undertake them deliberately, is in so far forth disciplined. Add to this ability a power to endure in an intelligently chosen course in the face of distraction, confusion, and difficulty, and you have the essence of discipline.
-John Dewey, Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education, "New York: The Free Press", 1916
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Education
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"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. Whatever value is possessed by the essay presented in this little volume resides in its attempt to call attention to the larger and deeper issues of Education so as to suggest their proper frame of reference."
-John Dewey, Experience and Education
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Education is a social process. Education is growth. Education is, not a preparation for life; education is life itself.
-John Dewey
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Habits
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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. Self-conceit often regards it as a sign of weakness to admit that a belief to which we have once committed ourselves is wrong. We get so identified with an idea that it is literally a pet notion and we rise to its defense and stop our eyes and ears to anything different.
-John Dewey
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Ideas
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In laying hands upon the sacred ark of absolute permanency, in treating the forms that had been regarded as types of fixity and perfection as originating and passing away, the Origin of Species introduced a mode of thinking that in the end was bound to transform the logic of knowledge, and hence the treatment of morals, politics, and religion.
-John Dewey
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Old ideas give way slowly; for they are more than abstract logical forms and categories, they are habits, predispositions, deeply ingrained attitudes of diversion and preference.
-John Dewey, The Influence of Darwinism on Philosophy, 1909
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Luck
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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.
-John Dewey
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Problems
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We only think when we are confronted with problems.
-John Dewey
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Religion
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The religious is any activity pursued in behalf of an ideal end against obstacles and in spite of threats of personal loss because of its general and enduring value.
-John Dewey
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Science
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"Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination."
-John Dewey, The Quest for Certainty
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Society
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"The good society was, like the good self, a diverse yet harmonious, growing yet unified whole, a fully participatory democracy in which the powers and capacities of the individuals that comprised it were harmonized by their cooperative activities into a community that permitted the full and free expression of individuality."
-John Dewey, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca:Cornell University Pres, 1991) p.164.
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Stubbornness
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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.
-John Dewey
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Success & Failure
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Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes. Genuine ignorance is profitable because it is likely to be accompanied by humility, curiosity, and open-mindedness; whereas ability to repeat catch-phrases, cant terms, familiar propositions, gives the conceit of learning and coats the mind with varnish waterproof to new ideas.
-John Dewey
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Work
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"To find out what one is fitted to do, and to secure an opportunity to do it, is the key to happiness."
-John Dewey
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Books by and about John Dewey