John Dewey Quotes

If education is to develop human nature so that it may attain the object of its being, it must involve the exercise of judgment.

Much education today is monumentally ineffective. All too often we are giving young people cut flowers when we should be teaching them to grow their own plants.

For what is the use of transmitting knowledge if the individual's total development lags behind?

Never talk about the faults of others, no matter how bad they may be. Nothing is ever gained by that. You never help one by talking about his fault; you do him an injury, and injure yourself as well.

I like unformed characters. This may be because, no matter how old I get, I am still unformed myself.

Each generation is inclined to educate its young so as to get along in the present world instead of with a view to the proper end of education: the promotion of the best possible realization of humanity as humanity. Parents educate their children so that they may get on; princes educate their subjects as instruments of their own purpose.

A university is not, primarily, a place in which to learn how to make a living; it is a place in which to learn how to be more fully a human being, how to draw upon one's resources, how to discipline the mind and expand the imagination; how to make some sense out of the big world we will shortly be thrown into.

You may think that if someone else doesn't change, you can never be happy. But if you change, you can be happy no matter what.

Intelligence plus character-that is the goal of true education.

For the sole true end of education is simply this: to teach men how to learn for themselves; and whatever instruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain.

Things may happen around you, and things may happen to you, but the only things that matter are the things that happen in you.

The best way to ensure success is to start growing today. No matter where you may be starting from, don't be discouraged; everyone who got where he is started where he was.

Make the most of the day, by determining to spend it on two sorts of acquaintances only--those by whom something may be got, and those from whom something may be learned.

I have found all things thus far, persons and inanimate matter, elements and seasons, strangely adapted to my resources.

You may think I’m small, but I have a universe inside my mind.

May you grow to be proud, dignified, and true, and do unto others as you'd have done to you.

This is not a matter of virtue-it's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default-setting, which is to be deeply and literally self-centered, and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self.

Any habit may be discontinued by building in its place some other and more desirable habit.

We do not escape our boundaries or our innermost being. We do not change. It is true we may be transformed, but we always walk within our boundaries, within the marked-off circle.

I'm not perfect, either. In the end, it's only God's judgement that matters, and I've learned enough to know that no one can presume to know the will of God.

To a visitor who asked to become his disciple the Master said, "You may live with me, but don't become my follower." "Whom, then, shall I follow?" "No one. The day you follow someone you cease to follow Truth .

May Allah have mercy on him who sends me my faults as a present.

I’ve learned that although our dreams may die, if you open yourself up to life, new ones are born.

Books are only made so that they may point the way to a higher life; but no good results unless the path is trodden with unflinching steps!

Time may change me, but I can't trace time.