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But the individual butterfly or earthquake remains just the unique existence which it is. We forget in explaining its occurrence that it is only the occurrence that is explained, not the thing itself.

John Dewey

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John Dewey
Age: 92 †
Born: 1859
Born: October 20
Died: 1952
Died: June 1
Aesthetician
Pedagogue
Philosopher
Professor
Psychologist
Sociologist
Teacher
Trade Unionist
Burlington
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Dewey
Butterfly
Remains
Unique
Existence
Occurrence
Forget
Earthquake
Individual
Earthquakes
Thing
Explained
Explaining

More quotes by John Dewey

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The good society was, like the good self, a diverse yet harmonious, growing yet unified whole, a fully participatory democracy in which the powers and capacities of the individuals that comprised it were harmonized by their cooperative activities into a community that permitted the full and free expression of individuality.
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To savages it would seem preposterous to seek out a place where nothing but learning was going on in order that one might learn.
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In brief, the function of knowledge is to make one experience freely available to other experiences.
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Teaching may be compared to selling commodities. No one can sell unless somebody buys.
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Even in a savage tribe, the achievements of adults are far beyond what the immature members would be capable of if left to themselves. With the growth of civilization, the gap between the original capacities of the immature and the standards and customs of the elders increases.
John Dewey
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Experience alone cannot deliver to us necessary truths truths completely demonstrated by reason. Its conclusions are particular, not universal.
John Dewey
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Within even the most social group there are many relations that are not as yet social.
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Education Proceeds ultimately from the patterns furnished by institutions, customs, and laws- If the patterns of institutions, customs, and laws are broken for this philosophy education should fix itself. There should be several different things taught instead of one Supreme Factor.
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Not perfection as a final goal, but the ever-enduring process of perfecting, maturing, refining is the aim of living.
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Selection aims not only at simplifying but at weeding out what is undesirable.
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Always make the other person feel important.
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Modern life means democracy, democracy means freeing intelligence for independent effectivenessthe emancipation of mind as an individual organ to do its own work. We naturally associate democracy, to be sure, with freedom of action, but freedom of action without freed capacity of thought behind it is only chaos.
John Dewey
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The intimation never wholly deserts us that there is, in the unformed activities of childhood and youth, the possibilities of a better life for the community as well as for individuals here and there. This dim sense is the ground of our abiding idealization of childhood.
John Dewey
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When things have a meaning for us, we mean (intend, propose) what we do: when they do not, we act blindly, unconsciously, unintelligently.
John Dewey
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If we teach today’s students as we taught yesterday’s, we rob them of tomorrow.
John Dewey
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Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination. What are now working conceptions, employed as a matter of course because they have withstood the tests of experiment and have emerged triumphant, were once speculative hypotheses.
John Dewey
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Any experience, however, trivial in its first appearance, is capable of assuming an indefinite richness of significance by extending its range of perceived connections.
John Dewey
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That education is not an affair of telling and being told, but an active and constructive process, is a principle almost as generally violated in practice as conceded in theory. Is not this deplorable situation due to the fact that the doctrine is itself merely told? It is preached it is lectured it is written about.
John Dewey
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Society exists through a process of transmission quite as much as biological life. This transmission occurs by means of communication of habits of doing, thinking, and feeling from the older to the younger.
John Dewey
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Language fails not because thought fails, but because no verbal symbols can do justice to the fullness and richness of thought. Ifwe are to continue talking about data in any other sense than as reflective distinctions, the original datum is always such a qualitative whole.
John Dewey