Skip to content

The ground or basis for a belief is deliberately sought and its adequacy to support the belief examined. This process is called reflective thought: it alone is truly educative in value, and it forms accordingly the principal subject of this volume.

Another quote →

Topics

Mind

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)

All John Dewey quotes →

You may also like

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

H. P. Lovecraft The Call of Cthulhu (1926)

Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.

Kenneth Boulding to Kenneth Boulding in: United States. Congress. House (1973)

The greater part of humanity is too much harassed and fatigued by the struggle with want, to rally itself for a new and sterner struggle with error.

Friedrich Schiller On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794)

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

George Bernard Shaw Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)

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.