John Dewey Quotes

If all human lives depended upon their usefulness - as might be judged by certain standards - there would be a sudden and terrific mortality in the world.

We are so overwhelmed with quantities of books, that we hardly realise any more that a book can be valuable, valuable like a jewel, or a lovely picture, into which you can look deeper and deeper and get a more profound experience every time.

We make conscious choices to do something a certain way.

The rotten apple spoils his companion.

It isn't only the terror everywhere, and the fear of being conscious of it, that freezes people. It's more than that. People know they are in a society dead or dying.

Labor is the true standard of value.

I'm not religious, but I put it that way because I feel so strongly. It's the one thing you do not ever do. You've got to have standards.

Home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in. In other words: Home has exceedingly low standards.

I was amazed as people must be who are seized and kidnapped, and who realize that in the strange world of their captors they have a value absolutely unconnected with anything they know about themselves.

At some clubs success is accidental. At Arsenal it is compulsory.

I have discovered that many of the things I thought were priceless are as cheap as costume jewelry, and much of what I labeled worthless was, all the time, filled with the kind of beauty that directly nourishes my soul... Now I think that the vast majority of us "normal" people spend our lives trashing our treasures and treasuring our trash. We bustle around trying to create the impression that we are hip, imperturbable, omniscient, in perfect control, when in fact we are awkward and scared and bewildered.

I try to write songs. At our concerts, we take the cream of the crop from my back catalogue and I don't know if I could write something now that would replace any of that. We don't lose any of the standards. We have lots of songs in rotation.

This is how most people live: alive, but not conscious; conscious but not aware; aware, but intermittently.

If courage wasn't a standard result of aging it meant that the young could somehow acquire it as well.

we were raising our standard of living at the expense of our standard of character.

Children are the true connoisseurs. What’s precious to them has no price, only value.

I would put primary emphasis on a good standard of living equitably distributed. It can't be equal, but one that eliminates the terrible cruelty of poverty.

We take almost all the decisive steps in our lives as a result of slight inner adjustments of which we are barely conscious.

Be awake to the details around you, but don't be self-conscious.

It's very tempting when you really want to be with someone to settle for much, much less - even a vague pathetic facsimile of less - than you would have ever imagined. Remember always what you set out to get, and please don't settle for less. These guys exist because there are a lot of women out there who allow them to.

The standard reason for Thanksgiving doesn't mean nothing to me.

Either the conscious intellect is impotent, or is not sufficiently strong, or is not the factor positively connected with altruistic phenomenon generally or their sublime form particularly.

One of the most difficult things in the world is to convince a woman that even a bargain costs money.

Reason is not like the goods sold in the market places--the more plentiful they are, the less they are worth. Reason's worth waxes with her abundance. But were she sold in the market, it is only the wise man who would understand her true value.