JOHN DEWEY

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.

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

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

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

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.

To me faith means not worrying.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

We only think when we are confronted with problems.

Arriving at one goal is the starting point to another.

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

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.

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

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

There is always the danger that increased personal independence will decrease the social capacity of an individual. In making him more self-reliant, it may make him more self-sufficient.... It often makes an individual so insensitive in his relations to others as to develop an illusion of being really able to stand and act alone -- an unnamed form of insanity which is responsible for a large part of the remedial suffering of the world

… the great equalizer.