Change as change is mere flux and lapse; it insults intelligence. Genuinely to know is to grasp a permanent end that realizes itself through changes.
Nature as a whole is a progressive realization of purpose strictly comparable to the realization of purpose in any single plant or animal.
Not perfection as a final goal, but the ever-enduring process of perfecting, maturing, refining is the aim of living.
It is difficult to connect general principles with such thoroughly concrete things as children.
Some experiences are mis-educative. Any experience is mis-educative that has the effect of arresting or distorting the growth of further experience.
Teachers are the agents through which knowledge and skills are communicated and rules of conduct enforced.
Poetry has historically been allied with religion and morals; it has served the purpose of penetrating the mysterious depths of things.
A person who is trained to consider his actions, to undertake them deliberately, is in so far forth disciplined. Add to this ability a power to endure in an intelligently chosen course in the face of distraction, confusion, and difficulty, and you have the essence of discipline.
One might as well say he has sold when no one has bought as to say he has taught when no one has learned.
We talk much more about individualism and liberty than our ancestors. But as so often happens, when anything becomes conscious, the consciousness is compensatory for absence in practice.
We cannot think of ourselves save as to some extent social being. Hence, we cannot separate the idea of ourselves and our own good from our idea of others and their good.
Collateral learning in the way of formation of enduring attitudes, of likes and dislikes, may be and often is much more important than the spelling lesson or lesson in geography or history that is learned.
Philosophy recovers itself when it ceases to be a device for dealing with the problems of philosophers and becomes a method, cultivated by philosophers, for dealing with the problems of men.
Our historic imagination is at best slightly developed. We generalise and idealise the past egregiously. We set up little toys to stand as symbols for centuries and the complicated lives of countless individuals.
The acquisition of skills is not an end in itself. They are things to be put to use, and that use is their contribution to a common and shared life.
Since growth is the characteristic of life, education is all one with growing; it has no end beyond itself. The criterion of the value of school education is the extent in which it creates a desire for continuous growth and supplies means for making the desire effective in fact.
The religious is any activity pursued in behalf of an ideal end against obstacles and in spite of threats of personal loss because of its general and enduring value.
An undesirable society, in other words, is one which internally and externally sets up barriers to free intercourse and communication of experience.
Popular psychology is a mass of cant, of slush and of superstition worthy of the most flourishing days of the medicine man.
We have lost confidence in reason because we have learned that man is chiefly a creature of habit and emotion.