John Dewey Quotes

The first type of abstraction from objects I shall refer to as simple abstraction, but the second type I shall call reflective abstraction, using this term in a double sense.

The analysis of the thing is not the thing itself.

Logicians may reason about abstractions. But the great mass of men must have images.

Intuition and concepts constitute... the elements of all our knowledge, so that neither concepts without an intuition in some way corresponding to them, nor intuition without concepts, can yield knowledge.

To define a thing is to substitute the definition for the thing itself.

When we come to images or memories or thoughts, speculation, while always closely related to practice, is more explicit, and it is in fact not immediately obvious that such processes can be described in any sense as practical.

Society's dark hull drifts further and further away. It is this place - the place of our separation, our distinction - that much of his poetry occupies.

I have an unusual type of thinking. I have no visual memory whatsoever. Everything is conceptual to me.

We coin concepts and we use them to analyse and explain nature and society. But we seem to forget, midway, that these concepts are our own constructs and start equating them with reality.

I constantly want to know - what is a table, or what is a cat?

Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.

You'd be surprised how hard it can often be to translate an action into an idea.

Abstraction is real, probably more real than nature.

Abstraction is a mental process we use when trying to discern what is essential or relevant to a problem; it does not require a belief in abstract entities.

Abstraction is everybody's zero but nobody's nought.

He whom God has touched will always be a being apart: he is, whatever he may do, a stranger among men; he is marked by a sign.

One can imagine that the ultimate mathematician is one who can see analogies between analogies.

As soon as there is language, generality has entered the scene.

From a drop of water a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other.

The art of doing mathematics consists in finding that special case which contains all the germs of generality.

Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.

I've always thought abstractly - through theme and variations rather than narrative.

All human knowledge thus begins with intuitions, proceeds thence to concepts, and ends with ideas.

As you deal with more and more complex systems, it becomes harder and harder to find deep and interesting properties.

Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.