John Dewey Quotes

Philosophy is the sum total of all that you know and what you decide is valuable.

Philosophy, to be relevant, must offer us a wisdom to live by.

Philosophy has no end in view save truth; faith looks for nothing but obedience and piety.

Philosophy is fundamentally about how you come to terms with living your life and trying to do it in a wise manner, and, for me, that means decently and compassionately and courageously and so forth.

There is philosophy, which is about conceptual analysis - about the meaning of what we say - and there is all of this ... all of life.

Morality is temporary, wisdom is permanent.

One of them is knowing the difference between Morality and Wisdom. Morality is temporary, Wisdom is permanent… Ho ho. Take that one to bed with you tonight.

I still don't even know if the sheriff will let me see him. And suppose he did; what then? What do I say to him? Do I know what a man is? Do I know how a man is supposed to die? I'm still trying to find out how a man should live. Am I supposed to tell someone how to die who has never lived?

What does he stand for?

Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits.

Philosophy cannot be taught; it is the application of the sciences to truth.

Ethics occupies a central place in philosophy because it is concerned with sin, with the origin of good and evil and with moral valuations. And since these problems have a universal significance, the sphere of ethics is wider than is generally supposed. It deals with meaning and value and its province is the world in which the distinction between good and evil is drawn, evaluations are made and meaning is sought.

What is the real relation between happiness and goodness? It is only within a few generations that men have found courage to say that there is none.

The great question of philosophy remains: If life is meaningless, what can be done about alphabet soup?

I don't really consider this a political issue, I consider it to be a moral issue.

Morality comes from humanism and is stolen by religion for its own purposes.

What is the real question is not whether to be, but how to be?

At the core of every moral code there is a picture of human nature, a map of the universe, and a version of history. To human nature (of the sort conceived), in a universe (of the kind imagined), after a history (so understood), the rules of the code apply.

We say then, that Christianity is adapted to the intellect, because its spirit coincides with that of true philosophy; because it removes the incubus of sensuality and low vice; because of the place it gives to truth; because it demands free inquiry; because its mighty truths and systems are brought before the mind in the same way as the truths and systems of nature; because it solves higher problems than nature can; and because it is so communicated as to be adapted to every mind.

Yet in truth the big question Camus asked was never the Anglo-American liberal one: How can we make the world a little bit better tomorrow? It was the grander French one: Why not kill yourself tonight? That the answers come to much the same thing in the end-easy does it; tomorrow may be a bit better than today; and, after all, you have to have a little faith in people-doesn't diminish the glamour that clings to the man who turned the question over and look at it, elegantly, upside down.

The highest of generalizations is the synergetic integration of truth and love.

It's catastrophies which turn wise and strong people into philosophers.

Morality must always precede and accompany religion, and yet religion is much more than morality.

But then, how could you have any self-respect knowing that you didn't believe in anything exactly? How did you embrace what was yours if you didn't leave something for it? How did you create a life of meaning and pride?

As a Roman philosopher, Cicero, said of him a few hundred years later, Socrates 'called philosophy down from the sky and established her in the towns and introduced her into homes and forced her to investigate life, ethics, good and evil.