John Dewey Quotes

Progress is measured by richness and intensity of experience - by a wider and deeper apprehension of the significance and scope of human existence.

That chain of relationships made me think of how connections are made--you read a book, you meet a person, you have a single experience, and your life is changed in some way. No act, therefore, however small, should be dismissed or ignored.

Any fact becomes important when it's connected to another.

If anything matters, then everything matters.

Sometimes they're nothing, sometimes they're something, sometimes there's a connection that years later may show up. All of this information is useful.

Across the moment, aeons speak with aeons. More than we experienced has gone by.

My gratitude to them [my first teachers] grows as I myself grow older.

Life takes a bit of time and a lot of relationship.

That man who is more then his elements knows the land that is more than its analysis.

Frequently consider the connection of all things in the universe.

The secret of what anything means to us depends on how we've connected it to all the other things we know. That's why it's almost always wrong to seek the "real meaning" of anything. A thing with just one meaning has scarcely any meaning at all.

If we represent knowledge as a tree, we know that things that are divided are yet connected. We know that to observe the divisions and ignore the connections is to destroy the tree.

First and last follow each other.

Have you seen a symphony orchestra? There is a person at the back carrying a triangle. Now and again the conductor will point to him or her and that person will play "ting." That might seem so insignificant, but in the conception of the composer something irreplaceable would be lost to the total beauty of the symphony if that "ting" did not happen.

Every problem emerges from the false belief we are separate from one another, and every answer emerges from the realization we are not.

People always say that, when you love someone, nothing in the world matters. But that's not true, is it? You know, and I know, that when you love someone, everything in the world matters a little bit more.

Without the constantly living and articulated eperience of absurdity, there would be no reason to attempt to do something meaningful. And on the contrary, how can one experience one's own absurdity if one is not constantly seeking meaning?

Sometimes it seems to me I've known so many men that the FBI ought to come to me first to compare fingerprints.

The world thus appears as a complicated tissue of events, in which connections of different kinds alternate or overlap or combine and thereby determine the texture of the whole.

When a poet writes a poem, meaning arises - because the poet is not alone; he has created something. When a dancer dances, meaning arises. When a mother gives birth to a child, meaning arises. Left alone, cut off from everything else, isolated like an island, you are meaningless. Joined together you are meaningful. The bigger the whole, the bigger is the meaning.

There’s a very deep connection among human beings. All we have to do is open our minds to it.

Nobody walks well first, nobody writes well first and nobody cooks well first.

For bel.i.eve me, the more one is, the richer is all one experiences. And whoever wants to have deep love in his life must collect and save for it and gather honey.

Memories just get richer with time.

Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.