John Dewey Quotes

Art is essentially communication. It doesn't exist in a vacuum. That's why people make art, so other people can relate to it.

Paper is at the center of so many of the elements of the development of civilization.

If people lacked the capacity to receive the thoughts of the men who preceded them and to pass on to others their own thoughts, men would be like wild beasts. And if men lacked this other capacity of being infected by art, people would be almost more savage still, and, above all, more separated from and more hostile to one another. Therefore the activity of art is a most important one, as important as the activity of speech itself and as generally diffused.

From cradle to grave this problem of running order through chaos, direction through space, discipline through freedom, unity through multiplicity, has always been, and must always be, the task of education, as it is the moral of religion, philosophy, science, art, politics and economy; but a boy's will is his life, and he dies when it is broken, as the colt dies in harness, taking a new nature in becoming tame.

Art is the queen of all sciences communicating knowledge to all the generations of the world.

What are works of art for? to educate, to be standards. To produce is of little use unless what we produce is known, is widely known, the wider known the better, for it is by being known that it works, it influences, it does its duty, it does good. We must try, then, to be known, aim at it, take means to it. And this without puffing in the process or pride in the success.

There must be understanding between the artist and the people. In the best ages of art that has always been the case. Genius can probably run on ahead and seek out new ways. But the good artists who follow after genius — and I count myself among these — have to restore the lost connection once more.

We think only through the medium of words. Languages are true analytical methods. Algebra, which is adapted to its purpose in every species of expression, in the most simple, most exact, and best manner possible, is at the same time a language and an analytical method. The art of reasoning is nothing more than a language well arranged.

it is always difficult to impress the ignorant.

Barack Obama understands what Ronald Reagan learned, which is that people vote not on the basis of issues and policy details, but on the basis of something deeper, namely, what are your values? Are you authentic? Do you say what you believe? Do you communicate with us? And do we identify with you? You don't know what particular issues are going to come up in the future, so you have to depend on someone's values, and whether they are telling you the truth, and whether you can trust them in office. Obama's been running a campaign on that basis.

All our efforts to attain immortality-by statesmanship, by conquest, by science or the arts-are equally vain in the long run, because the long run is longer than any of us can imagine.

Readers have a loyalty that cannot be matched anywhere else in the creative arts, which explains why so many writers who have run out of gas can keep coasting anyway, propelled on to the bestseller lists by the magic words AUTHOR OF on the covers of their books.

I shall commit my thoughts to paper, it is true; but that is a poor medium for the communication of feeling. I desire the company of a man who could sympathize with me, whose eyes would reply to mine.

It be urged that the wild and uncultivated tree, hitherto yielding sour and bitter fruit only, can never be made to yield better; yet we know that the grafting art implants a new tree on the savage stock, producing what is most estimable in kind and degree. Education, in like manner, engrafts a new man on the native stock, and improves what in his nature was vicious and perverse into qualities of virtue and social worth.

To be thoroughly imbued, with the liberal arts refines the manners, and makes men to be mild and gentle in their conduct.

Well that's a bit of a question like saying, what have you learned in life that would help you lead? My whole life has been learning to lead, from my parents, to my education, to the experience I had in the private sector, to helping run the Olympics, and then of course helping guide a state. Those experiences in totality have given me an understanding of how America works and how the economy works.

Ultimately what we actors are doing is communicating with people who are feeling alone or feeling different or confused or whatever and you're communicating and saying, "Hey, I don't get to know you, but here's a piece of me and you're not alone. We're in this together." Hopefully that communication has maybe made some people feel less alone.

When words do not enter as factors into a shared situation, either overtly or imaginatively, they operate as pure physical stimuli, not as having a meaning or intellectual value. They set activity running in a given groove, but there is no accompanying conscious purpose or meaning.

Qui plussait, plus se tait. French, you know. The more a man knows, the less he talks.

What's important is the way we say it. Art is all about craftsmanship. Others can interpret craftsmanship as style if they wish. Style is what unites memory or recollection, ideology, sentiment, nostalgia, presentiment, to the way we express all that. It's not what we say but how we say it that matters.

Humans are allergic to change. They love to say, 'We've always done it this way.' I try to fight that. That's why I have a clock on my wall that runs counter-clockwise.

I've worked with a ginormous number of people over the years. What happens when you've been around for a while, when you run into people whose work you've seen and liked and they have seen and liked your work, there's a sense of you kind of know each other even though you don't.

In the long run I certainly hope information is the cure for fanaticism, but I am afraid information is more the cause than the cure.

Science and art sometimes can touch one another, like two pieces of the jigsaw puzzle which is our human life, and that contact may be made across the boderline between the two respective domains.