John Dewey Quotes

In philosophy, when we make use of false principles, we depart the farther from the knowledge of truth and wisdom exactly in proportion to the care with which we cultivate them, and apply ourselves to the deduction of diverse consequences from them, thinking that we are philosophizing well, while we are only departing the farther from the truth; from which it must be inferred that they who have learned the least of all that has been hitherto distinguished by the name of philosophy are the most fitted for the apprehension of truth.

Man is the Reasoning Animal. Such is the claim. I think it is open to dispute.

In a world in which we are exposed to more information, more options, more philosophies, more perspectives than ever before, in which we must choose the values by which we will live (rather than unquestioningly follow some tradition for no better reason than that our own parents did), we need to be willing to stand on our own judgment and trust our own intelligence-to look at the world through our own eyes-to chart our course and think through how to achieve the future we want, to commit ourselves to continuous questioning and learning-to be, in a word, self-responsible.

Everything hangs on one's thinking.

We always think from where we come from. We always think from the sources that shape our understanding. I think about the world through the lens of my Islamic tradition. I accept this but I must also have intellectual humility.

That's why it's always worth having a few philosophers around the place. One minute it's all is truth beauty and is beauty truth, and does a falling tree in the forest make a sound if there's no one there to hear it, and then just when you think they're going to start dribbling one of 'em says, incidentally, putting a thirty-foot parabolic reflector on a high place to shoot the rays of the sun at an enemy's ships would be a very interesting demonstration of optical principles.

Philosophy ought to question the basic assumptions of the age. Thinking through, critically and carefully, what most of us take for granted is, I believe, the chief task of philosophy, and the task that makes philosophy a worthwhile activity.

When I think about what part of my college experience came back in my work experience, I feel like it was learning how to read deeper, learning how to keep filling the movie up with more and more resonance.

Philosophy unravels the knots in our thinking; hence its results must be simple, but its activity is as complicated as the knots that it unravels.

The emblem of a philosophy is not that it contains a set of specific thoughts , but that it generates a way of thinking.

I think that the task of philosophy is not to provide answers, but to show how the way we perceive a problem can be itself part of a problem.

Look - I understand that an unexamined life is not worth living, but do you think I could someday have an unexamined lunch?

As towards most other things of which we have but little personal experience (foreigners, or socialists, or aristocrats, as the case may be), there is a degree of vague ill-will towards what is called Thinking. ... I am tempted to believe that much of the mischief thus laid at the door of that poor unknown quantity Thinking is really due to its ubiquitous twin-brother Talking.

Even as a kid- do all kids think about this? I hope they don’t, I hope my kids don’t think about this- I was always thinking about, "Well, what are we doing? What is this all about?"

When people begin to philosophize they seem to think it necessary to make themselves artificially stupid.

Philosophy is an unusually ingenious attempt to think fallaciously.

Thinking which displaces, or otherwise defines, the sacred has been called atheistic, and that philosophy which does not place it here or there, like a thing, but at the joining of things and words, will always be exposed to this reproach without ever being touched by it.

The wise skeptic does not teach doubt but how] to look for the permanent in the mutable and fleeting.

If you will take my advice you will think little of Socrates, and a great deal more of truth.

When I start a new seminar I tell my students that I will undoubtedly contradict myself, and that I will mean both things. But an acceptance of contradiction is no excuse for fuzzy thinking. We do have to use our minds as far as they will take us, yet acknowledge that they cannot take use all the way.

Descartes spent far too much time in bed subject to the persistent hallucination that he was thinking. You are not free from a similar disorder.

Philosophy means thinking things out for oneself. Ultimately, there can be only one true philosophy, since reason is one and we all live in the same world.

The chief error in philosophy is overstatement.