Anyone who has begun to think, places some portion of the world in jeopardy.
John Dewey

Arriving at one goal is the starting point to another.
John Dewey

By object is meant some element in the complex whole that is defined in abstraction from the whole of which it is a distinction.
John Dewey

Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.
John Dewey

Education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living.
John Dewey

Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.
John Dewey

Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes.
John Dewey

Just as a flower which seems beautiful and has color but no perfume, so are the fruitless words of the man who speaks them but does them not.
John Dewey

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.
John Dewey

Man is not logical and his intellectual history is a record of mental reserves and compromises. He hangs on to what he can in his old beliefs even when he is compelled to surrender their logical basis.
John Dewey


Man lives in a world of surmise, of mystery, of uncertainties.
John Dewey

Nature is the mother and the habitat of man, even if sometimes a stepmother and an unfriendly home.
John Dewey

No man's credit is as good as his money.
John Dewey

One lives with so many bad deeds on one's conscience and some good intentions in one's heart.
John Dewey

Skepticism: the mark and even the pose of the educated mind.
John Dewey

Such happiness as life is capable of comes from the full participation of all our powers in the endeavor to wrest from each changing situations of experience its own full and unique meaning.
John Dewey

The belief that all genuine education comes about through experience does not mean that all experiences are genuinely or equally educative.
John Dewey

The good man is the man who, no matter how morally unworthy he has been, is moving to become better.
John Dewey

The path of least resistance and least trouble is a mental rut already made. It requires troublesome work to undertake the alternation of old beliefs.
John Dewey

The self is not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation through choice of action.
John Dewey