The empiric easily degenerates into the quack. He does not know where his knowledge begins or leaves off, and so when he gets beyond routine conditions he begins to pretend-to make claims for which there is no justification, and to trust to luck and to ability to impose upon others-to “bluff.”
Every serious-minded person knows that a large part of the effort required in moral discipline consists in the courage needed to acknowledge the unpleasant consequences of one’s past and present acts.
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.
If all meanings could be adequately expressed by words, the arts of painting and music would not exist.
The reactionaries are in possession of force, in not only the army and police, but in the press and the schools.
Modern philosophy certainly exacts a surrender of all supernaturalism and fixed dogma and rigid institutionalism with which Christianity has been historically associated.
By reading the characteristic features of any man’s castles in the air you can make a shrewd guess as to his underlying desires which are frustrated.
The outstanding problem of the Public is discovery and identification of itself.
Things gain meaning by being used in a shared experience or joint action.
It may be said that an education which does not succeed in making poetry a resource in the business of life as well as in its leisure, has something the matter with it.
The deepest urge in human nature is the desire to feel important.
Perhaps the greatest of all pedagogical fallacies is the notion that a person learns only the particular thing he is studying at the time.
Every thinker puts some portion of an apparently stable world in peril.
Democracy is a form of government only because it is a form of moral and spiritual association.
Art is the most effective mode of communications that exists.
Like the soil, mind is fertilized while it lies fallow, until a new burst of bloom ensues.
The educational process has no end beyond itself; it is its own end.
We always live at the time we live and not at some other time, and only by extracting at each present time the full meaning of each present experience are we prepared for doing the same thing in the future.
Faith in the possibilities of continued and rigorous inquiry does not limit access to truth to any channel or scheme of things. It does not first say that truth is universal and then add there is but one road to it.
The good man is the man who, no matter how morally unworthy he has been, is moving to become better.