John Dewey Quotes

Everybody is someone else's instrument.

If your neighbor's reality changes, yours will change as well.

Life is a system of relations rather than a positive and independent existence; and he who would be happy himself and make others happy must carefully preserve these relations. He cannot stand apart in surly and haughty egoism; let him learn that he is as much dependent on others as others are on him.

Everything comes to us from others. To Be is to belong to someone.

You can exert no influence if you are not susceptible to influence.

We are all feeding from each other, all the time, every day.

We're as much influenced by everybody else as they are by us, if they are. It's just all a part of the big thing.

All is connected... no one thing can change by itself.

There's no such thing as an independent person.

There is not a single one of us with a job that is not completely reliant in some way shape or form on others.

I think we all change each other's paths. I don't know which law idea that is in physics, but I don't think any of us can live without affecting one another.

What I do affects others; what others do affects me.

We are dependent on each other. Therefore, replenishing the soil, replenishing society and being part of one continuum - that's the new story.

Nobody in the world is completely dependent on another person, but we are all interdependent.

From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do know: that we are here for the sake of each other - above all for those upon whose smile and well-being our own happiness depends, and also for the countless unknown souls with whose fate we are connected by a bond of sympathy. Many times a day I realize how much my own outer and inner life is built upon the labors of my fellow men, both living and dead, and how earnestly I must exert myself in order to give in return as much as I have received.

As Unto the bow the the cord is , So unto the man is woman; Though she bends him, she obeys him, Though she draws him , yet she follows: Useless each without the other.

We need each other to do things that we can't do for ourselves. If we are intimately connected with each other, we just give things to each other; if we don't know each other we find another way to handle it. If you think about it, each according to his or her abilities and each according to his or her needs is sort of the same thing as supply and demand.

The main thing I wanted to say, and thankfully it’s what most people say they get out of the book, is simply an acknowledgement that we do affect each other in ways we can’t predict.

The sort of dependence that results from exchange, i.e., from commercial transactions, is a reciprocal dependence. We cannot be dependent upon a foreigner without his being dependent on us. Now, this is what constitutes the very essence of society. To sever natural interrelations is not to make oneself independent, but to isolate oneself completely.

It occurred to me that if Africa needed us, sometimes we needed Africa a great deal more.

We all possess, like it or not, the people we know, and are possessed by them in turn.

God has made us so that we must be mutually dependent. We may ignore our own dependence, or refuse to acknowledge that others depend upon us in more respects than the payment of weekly wages; but the thing must be, nevertheless. Neither you nor any other master can help yourselves. The most proudly independent man depends on those around him for their insensible influence on his character - his life.

A here exists only in relation to a there, not the other way around. There's this only because there's that; if we don't look up, we'll never know what's down. Think of it, boy. We find ourselves only by looking what we're not. You can't put your feet on the ground until you've touched the sky.

Nature loves nothing solitary, and always reaches out to something, as a support, which ever in the sincerest friend is most delightful.