John Dewey Quotes

It's a good idea to have a break, to let your mind rest and so you can start to cultivate ideas.

My mind becomes tired, and perhaps some of yours do. If so, go and exercise your bodies.

Your thoughts are like the seeds you plant in your garden. Your beliefs are like the soil in which you plant these seeds.

The intellect must not be kept at consistent tension, but diverted by pastimes.... The mind must have relaxation, and will rise stronger and keener after recreation.

A mind once cultivated will not lie fallow for half an hour.

The tired parts of the mind can be rested and strengthened not merely by rest, but by using other parts.

In the productions of the mind, as in those of the soil, the gifts of nature are excelled by industry and skill . . .

Our minds must relax: they will rise better and keener after rest. Just as you must not force fertile farmland, as uninterrupted productivity will soon exhaust it, so constant effort will sap our mental vigour, while a short period of rest and relaxation will restore our powers. Unremitting effort leads to a kind of mental dullness and lethargy.

There's this American pretense, which is the pretense of the journalist with the view from nowhere - which has somehow morphed into the journalist who was born this morning. So, he doesn't know that Donald Trump lied yesterday, and the day before. So, he concludes that he doesn't know whether Trump lied accidentally or on purpose. You can only pretend not to know that if you don't know that he lied yesterday, and the day before. So, to my mind when NPR says they don't know if he's intentionally lying, they're lying. We have to be smarter about it.

Our mind is like a field, and performing actions is like sowing seeds in that field.

At length weariness succeeds to labor, and the mind lies at ease in the contemplation of her own attainments without any desire of new conquests or excursions. This is the age of recollection and narrative; the opinions are settled, and the avenues of apprehension shut against any new intelligence; the days that are to follow must pass in the inculcation of precepts already collected, and assertion of tenets already received; nothing is henceforward so odious as opposition, so insolent as doubt, or so dangerous as novelty.

For piety lies not in being often seen turning a veiled head to stones, nor in approaching every altar, nor in lying prostratebefore the temples of the gods, nor in sprinkling altars with the blood of beastsbut rather in being able to look upon all things with a mind at peace.

I had rather fashion my mind than furnish it.

Once you master how your own consciousness operates, anything can be desired and achieved.

And soon a branch, part of a hidden scene,The leafy mind, that long was tightly furled,Will turn its private substance into green,And young shoots spread upon our inner world.

There are of course mornings when you wouldn't mind a lie in.

A mind truly cultivated never feels that the intellectual process is complete until it can reproduce in some media the thing which it has absorbed.

A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition. Like money, books must be kept in constant circulation... A book is not only a friend, it makes friends for you. When you have possessed a book with mind and spirit, you are enriched. But when you pass it on you are enriched threefold.

There was about six months when I was absorbing other stuff and not drawing very much. After a long period of not drawing, you have to, like, relearn how to draw. It's not very fun.

When we change, the world changes. The key to all change is in our inner transformation- a change of our hearts and minds. This is human revolution. We all have the power to change. When we realize this truth, we can bring forth that power anywhere, anytime, and in any situation.

The rocks are not so close akin to us as the soil; they are one more remove from us; but they lie back of all, and are the final source of all. ... Time, geologic time, looks out at us from the rocks as from no other objects in the landscape.

I am an instrument in the shape/ of a woman trying to translate pulsations/ into images for the relief of the body/ and the reconstruction of the mind.

Happiness is a state of mind, so the real source of happiness must lie within the mind, not in external conditions.

Writing, as I experience it, means wringing out the heart/mind until it stops lying.

The ideal is the flower-garden of the mind, and very apt to run to weeds unless carefully tended.