Top 280 John Dewey Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “There is no discipline in the world so severe as the discipline of experience subjected to the tests of intelligent development and direction.”

— John Dewey

152. “One of the saddest things about US education is that the wisdom of our most successful teachers is lost to the profession when they retire.”

— John Dewey

153. “The development occurs through reciprocal give-and-take, the teacher taking but not being afraid also to give.”

— John Dewey

154. “The plea for the predominance of learning to read in early school life because of the great importance attaching to literature seems to be a perversion.”

— John Dewey

155. “To be interested is to be absorbed in, wrapped up in, carried away by, some object. To take an interest is to be on the alert, to care about, to be attentive.”

— John Dewey

156. “All education which develops power to share effectively in social life is moral.”

— John Dewey

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

— John Dewey

158. “Intelligent thinking means an increment of freedom in action-an emancipation from chance and fatality. ‘Thought’ represents the suggestion of a way of response that is different from that which would have been followed if intelligent observation had not effected an inference as to the future.”

— John Dewey

159. “Language fails not because thought fails, but because no verbal symbols can do justice to the fullness and richness of thought. Ifwe are to continue talking about “data” in any other sense than as reflective distinctions, the original datum is always such a qualitative whole.”

— John Dewey

160. “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.”

— John Dewey

161. “The acquisition of skills is not an end in itself. They are things to be put to use, and that use is their contribution to a common and shared life.”

— John Dewey

162. “It is commonplace that a problem stated is well on its way to solution, for statement of the nature of a problem signifies that the underlying quality is being transformed into determinate distinctions of terms and relations or has become an object of articulate thought.”

— John Dewey

163. “An undesirable society, in other words, is one which internally and externally sets up barriers to free intercourse and communication of experience.”

— John Dewey

164. “There is nothing left worth preserving in the notions of unseen powers, controlling human destiny, to which obedience and worship are due.”

— John Dewey

165. “We have lost confidence in reason because we have learned that man is chiefly a creature of habit and emotion.”

— John Dewey

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

— John Dewey

167. “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.”

— John Dewey

168. “Every subject at some phase of its development should possess, what is for the individual concerned with it, an aesthetic quality.”

— John Dewey

169. “New inventions, new machines, new methods of transportation and intercourse are making over the whole scene of action year by year. It is an absolute impossibility to educate the child for any fixed station in life.”

— John Dewey

170. “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

171. “For one man who thanks God that he is not as other men there are a thousand to offer thanks that they are as other men, sufficiently as others are to escape attention.”

— John Dewey

172. “Since a democratic society repudiates the principle of external authority, it must find a substitute in voluntary disposition and interest; these can be created only by education.”

— John Dewey

173. “A single course of studies for all progressive schools is out of the question; it would mean abandoning the fundamental principle of connection with life-experiences.”

— John Dewey

174. “The only way to abolish war is to make peace seem heroic.”

— John Dewey

175. “Society exists through a process of transmission quite as much as biological life. This transmission occurs by means of communication of habits of doing, thinking, and feeling from the older to the younger.”

— John Dewey

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

— John Dewey

177. “Education has no more serious responsibility than the making of adequate provision for enjoyment of recreative leisure not only for the sake of immediate health, but for the sake of its lasting effect upon the habits of the mind.”

— John Dewey

178. “The most important factor in the training of good mental habits consists in acquiring the attitude of suspended conclusion, and in mastering the various methods of searching for new materials to corroborate or to refute the first suggestions that occur.”

— John Dewey

179. “A large part of the art of instruction lies in making the difficulty of new problems large enough to challenge thought, and small enough so that, in addition to the confusion naturally attending the novel elements, there shall be luminous familiar spots from which helpful suggestions may spring.”

— John Dewey

180. “The first step in freeing men from external chains was to emancipate them from the internal chains of false beliefs and ideals. To free one’s mind of chains is to free it of the care of what is acceptable or viewed so by society, this is when true freedom is discovered.”

— John Dewey

181. “Expertness of taste is at once the result and reward of constant exercise of thinking.”

— John Dewey

182. “We sometimes talk as if “original research” were a peculiar prerogative of scientists or at least of advanced students. But all thinking is research, and all research is native, original, with him who carries it on, even if everybody else in the world already is sure of what he is still looking for.”

— John Dewey

183. “In object lessons in elementary education and in laboratory instruction in higher education, the subject is often so treated that the student fails to “see the forest on account of the trees.”

— John Dewey

184. “The problem is to extract the desirable traits of forms of community life which actually exist, and employ them to criticize undesirable features and suggest improvement.”

— John Dewey

185. “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

186. “Liberty is not just an idea, an abstract principle. It is power, effective power to do specific things. There is no such thing as liberty in general; liberty, so to speak, at large.”

— John Dewey

187. “A possibility of continuing progress is opened up by the fact that in learning one act, methods are developed good for use in other situations. Still more important is the fact that the human being acquires a habit of learning. He learns to learn.”

— John Dewey

188. “An education could be given which would sift individuals, discovering what they were good for, and supplying a method of assigning each to the work in life for which his nature fits him.”

— John Dewey

189. “Mankind likes to think in terms of extreme opposites.”

— John Dewey

190. “Without the English, reason and philosophy would still be in the most despicable infancy in France.”

— John Dewey

191. “Many of the obstacles for change which have been attributed to human nature are in fact due to the inertia of institutions and to the voluntary desire of powerful classes to maintain the existing status.”

— John Dewey

192. “Man’s home is nature; his purposes and aims are dependent for execution upon natural conditions. Separated from such conditions they become empty dreams and idle indulgences of fancy.”

— John Dewey

193. “Insecurity cuts deeper and extends more widely than bare unemployment. Fear of loss of work, dread of the oncoming of old age, create anxiety and eat into self-respect in a way that impairs personal dignity.”

— John Dewey

194. “Men’s fundamental attitudes toward the world are fixed by the scope and qualities of the activities in which they partake.”

— John Dewey

195. “One lives with so many bad deeds on one’s conscience and some good intentions in one’s heart.”

— John Dewey

196. “Choice is the declaration by self that a certain ideal of self shall be realized.”

— John Dewey

197. “What holds for adults holds even more for children, sensitive and conscious of differences. I certainly hope that the Board of Education will think very, very seriously before it introduces this division and antagonism in our public schools.”

— John Dewey

198. “Method means that arrangement of subject matter which makes it most effective in use. Never is method something outside of the material.”

— John Dewey

199. “The ideal may seem remote of execution, but the democratic ideal of education is a farcical yet tragic delusion except as the ideal more and more dominates our public system of education.”

— John Dewey

200. “If a mans actions are not guided by thoughtful conclusions, then they are guided by inconsiderate impulse, unbalanced appetite, caprice, or the circumstances of the moment. To cultivate unhindered, reflective external activity is to foster enslavement, for it leaves the person at the mercy of appetite, sense and circumstance.”

— John Dewey