John Dewey Quotes

What is necessary is to rectify names.

Clarity in language depends on clarity in thought.

Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation.

We see only what we have names for.

They say that nameless things change constantly—that names fix them in place like pins.

If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things.

The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper name.

Whether the person should then be called "an intellectual" seems to reduce the issue to a question of terminology.

Insight is not a matter of memory, of knowledge and time, which are all thought.

A man of clear ideas errs grievously if he imagines that whatever is seen confusedly does not exist; it belongs to him, when he meets with such a thing, to dispel the midst, and fix the outlines of the vague form which is looming through it.

Poetry is essentially the discovery, the love, the passion for the name of everything.

The understanding of some men is clear, that of others brilliant. The former illumines its surroundings; the latter obscures them.

Language serves not only to express thought but to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it.

And I'm convinced that knowing the names of things braces people up.

All names mean something.

Finding a name for something is a way of conjuring its existence, of making it possible for people to see a pattern where they didn't see anything before.

As soon as a true thought has entered our mind, it gives a light which makes us see a crowd of other objects which we have never perceived before.

Then you should say what you mean," the March Hare went on. "I do," Alice hastily replied; "at least--at least I mean what I say--that's the same thing, you know." "Not the same thing a bit!" said the Hatter. "You might just as well say that "I see what I eat" is the same thing as "I eat what I see"!

Words, like glasses, obscure everything they do not make clear. Before using a fine word, make a place for it.

Does choice exist when I see something very clearly?

If I can assign names as well as pictures to objects, the right assignment of them we may call truth, and the wrong assignment of them falsehood.

A man with a scant vocabulary will almost certainly be a weak thinker. The richer and more copious one's vocabulary and the greater one's awareness of fine distinctions and subtle nuances of meaning, the more fertile and precise is likely to be one's thinking. Knowledge of things and knowledge of the words for them grow together. If you do not know the words, you can hardly know the thing.

There is no point in having sharp images when you've fuzzy ideas.

I have learnt to appreciate the clarity of English language.

What we take anything to be profoundly affects how we go about describing it, and how we describe something profoundly affects how we go about explaining, accounting for, or understanding what is what we are, in a sense, defining, by our description.