In the last analysis, then, we believe that we all know and think about and talk about the same world because we believe our PERCEPTS are possessed by us in common.
To know an object is to lead to it through a context which the world provides.
To give the theory plenty of ‘rope’ and see if it hangs itself eventually is better tactics than to choke it off at the outset b abstract accusations of self-contradiction.
To consider hypotheses is surely always better than to dogmatize ins blaue hinein.
True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate, and verify. False ideas are those that we cannot.
Truth is one species of good, and not, as is usually supposed, a category distinct from good, and co-ordinate with it.
Psychology is a science, and teaching is an art; and sciences never generate arts directly out of themselves.
You make a great, very great mistake, if you think that psychology, being the science of the mind’s laws, is something from which you can deduce definite programmes and schemes and methods of instruction for immediate schoolroom use.
Ingenuity in meeting and pursuing the pupil, that tact for the concrete situation, though they are the alpha and omega of the teacher’s art, are things to which psychology cannot help us in the least.
Psychology saves us from mistakes. It makes us more clear as to what we are about. We gain confidence in respect to any method which we are using as soon as we believe that it has theory as well as practice at its back.
The amount of psychology which is necessary to all teachers need not be very great.
What a teacher needs to know about psychology “might almost be written on the palm of one’s hand.”
The worst thing that can happen to a good teacher is to get a bad conscience about her profession because she feels herself hopeless as a psychologist.
A new opinion counts as true just in proportion as it gratifies the individual’s desire to assimilate the novel in his experience to his beliefs in stock.
Results should not be too voluntarily aimed at or too busily thought of. They are sure to float up of their own accord from a long enough daily work at a given matter.
I am well aware how odd it must seem to some of you to hear me say that an idea is true so long as to believe it is profitable to our lives.
Owing to the fact that all experience is a process, no point of view can ever be the last one.
Equality is attainable as long as you are part of the majority.
Footnotes – little dogs yapping at the heels of the text.
As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use.