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As we shall see later, the most important factor in the training of good mental habits consists in acquiring the attitude of suspended conclusion, and in mastering the various methods of searching for new materials to corroborate or to refute the first suggestions that occur. To maintain the state of doubt and to carry on systematic and protracted inquiry ― these are the essentials of thinking.

— John Dewey How We Think (1910)

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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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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.