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The worst thing about stubbornness of mind, about prejudices, is that they arrest development; they shut off the mind from new stimuli. Open-mindedness means retention of the childlike attitude; closed-mindedness means premature intellectual old age.

— John Dewey Democracy and Education (1916)

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Attitude

More quotes by John Dewey

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

The Quest for Certainty (1929)

Every thinker puts some portion of an apparently stable world in peril and no one can wholly predict what will emerge in its place.

Experience and Nature (1925)

Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.

The true antithesis of nature is not art but arbitrary conceit, fantasy, and stereotyped convention.

Art as Experience (1934)

Coleridge said that every work of art must have about it something not understood to obtain its full effect.

Art as Experience (1934)

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The truth is that it is our attitude towards children that is right, and our attitude towards grown-up people that is wrong.

G. K. Chesterton The Defendant (1901)

The Great Vehicle path requires the vast motivation of a Bodhisattva, who, not seeking just his or her welfare, takes on the burden of bringing about the welfare of all sentient beings.

Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama The Dalai Lama at Harvard: Lectures on the Buddhist Path to Peace (1988)

It is very important to generate a good attitude, a good heart, as much as possible. From this, happiness in both the short term and the long term for both yourself and others will come.

Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama

I feel that the essence of spiritual practice is your attitude toward others.

Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: John Dewey (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.