Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The phrase "think for one's self" is a pleonasm. Unless one does it for one's self, it isn't thinking.
If all meanings could be adequately expressed by words, the arts of painting and music would not exist.
One might as well say he has sold when no one has bought as to say he has taught when no one has learned.
Teachers are the agents through which knowledge and skills are communicated and rules of conduct enforced.
To the being of fully alive, the future is not ominous but a promise; it surrounds the present like a halo.
The teacher loses the position of external boss or dictator but takes on that of leader of group activities
The spontaneous power of the child, his demand for self-expression, can not by any possibility be suppressed.
Thinking is the accurate and deliberate instituting of connections between what is done and its consequences.
One can think effectively only when one is willing to endure suspense and to undergo the trouble of searching.
What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all of its children.
The development occurs through reciprocal give-and-take, the teacher taking but not being afraid also to give.
We have lost confidence in reason because we have learned that man is chiefly a creature of habit and emotion.
The reactionaries are in possession of force, in not only the army and police, but in the press and the schools
most notable distinction between living and inanimate beings is that the former maintain themselves by renewal.
Every living being needs continually renewed, and education is simply the chief process by which renewal occurs.
Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes.
The real process of education should be the process of learning to think through the application of real problems.
I believe that in the ideal school we have the reconciliation of the individualistic and the institutional ideals.
Schools should take an active part in directing social change, and share in the construction of a new social order
Cease conceiving of education as mere preparation for later life, and make it the full meaning of the present life.
I should venture to assert that the most pervasive fallacy of philosophic thinking goes back to neglect of context.
The future of our civilisation depends upon the widening spread and deepening hold of the scientific habit of mind.
The end justifies the means only when the means used are such as actually bring about the desired and desirable end.
Not perfection as a final goal, but the ever-enduring process of perfecting, maturing, refining is the aim of living.
The school must be "a genuine form of active community life, instead of a place set apart in which to learn lessons".
Every society gets encumbered with what is trivial, with dead wood from the past, and with what is positively perverse.
Complete adaptation to environment means death. The essential point in all response is the desire to control environment.
In general, every stimulus directs activity. It does not simply excite it or stir it up, but directs it toward an object.
Men's fundamental attitudes toward the world are fixed by the scope and qualities of the activities in which they partake.
I believe that in this way the teacher always is the prophet of the true God and the usherer in of the true kingdom of God.
Popular psychology is a mass of cant, of slush and of superstition worthy of the most flourishing days of the medicine man.
As some species die out, forms better adapted to utilize the obstacles against which they struggled in vain come into being.
Knowledge is no longer an immobile solid; it has been liquefied. it is actively moving in all the currents of society itself
Not only is social life identical with communication, but all communication (and hence all genuine social life) is educative.
The first step in freeing men from external chains was to emancipate them from the internal chains of false beliefs and ideals.
As long as politics is the shadow cast on society by big business, the attenuation of the shadow will not change the substance.
As societies become more complex in structure and resources, the need of formal or intentional teaching and learning increases.
Luck, bad if not good, will always be with us. But it has a way of favoring the intelligent and showing its back to the stupid.
By object is meant some element in the complex whole that is defined in abstraction from the whole of which it is a distinction.
To savages it would seem preposterous to seek out a place where nothing but learning was going on in order that one might learn.
A democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience.
Legislation is a matter of more or less intelligent improvisation aiming at palliating conditions by means of patchwork policies.
Insight into soul-action, ability to discriminate the genuine from the sham and capacity to further one and discourage the other.
If the eye is constantly greeted by harmonious objects, having elegance of form and color, a standard of taste naturally grows up.
Every subject at some phase of its development should possess, what is for the individual concerned with it, an aesthetic quality.
Traveling is a constant arriving, while arrival that precludes further traveling is most easily attained by going to sleep or dying.
Poetry has historically been allied with religion and morals; it has served the purpose of penetrating the mysterious depths of things.
No system has ever as yet existed which did not in some form involve the exploitation of some human beings for the advantage of others.
Method means that arrangement of subject matter which makes it most effective in use. Never is method something outside of the material.
The conception of education as a social process and function has no definite meaning until we define the kind of society we have in mind.