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“Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.”

John Dewey

The Quest for Certainty (1929), Ch. XI
Misc. Quotes
Source: The Quest for Certainty: A Study of the Relation of Knowledge and Action

Imagination , Science

“Scientific principles and laws do not lie on the surface of nature. They are hidden, and must be wrested from nature by an active and elaborate technique of inquiry.”

John Dewey book Reconstruction in Philosophy

Source: Reconstruction in Philosophy

Lie , Law , Nature

“The most important attitude that can be formed is that of desire to go on learning.”

John Dewey book Experience and Education

Source: Experience and Education

Learning

“Conflict is the gadfly of thought. It stirs us to observation and memory. It instigates invention. It shocks us out of sheep-like passivity, and sets us at noting and contriving…conflict is a sine qua non of reflection and ingenuity.”

John Dewey
Memory

“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.”

John Dewey book Experience and Education

Source: Experience and Education

Time , Future

“p. 407–8 cited in: Hilary Putnam (2008) "Pragmatism and nonscientific knowledge" James Conant, Urszula M. Zeglen (2012) Hilary Putnam: Pragmatism and Realism.”

John Dewey

Source: Experience and Nature (1925), p. 21

Knowledge

“…classic philosophy maintained that change, and consequently time, are marks of inferior reality, holding that true and ultimate reality is immutable and eternal. Human reasons, all too human, have given birth to the idea that over and beyond the lower realm of things that shift like the sands on the seashore there is the kingdom of the unchanging, of the complete, the perfect. The grounds for the belief are couched in the technical language of philosophy, but the grounds for the cause is the heart's desire for surcease from change, struggle, and uncertainty. The eternal and immutable is the consummation of mortal man's quest for certainty.”

John Dewey

Time and Individuality (1940)

Idea , Birth , Reality , Change

“The ground of democratic ideas and practices is faith in the potentialities of individuals, faith in the capacity for positive developments if proper conditions are provided. The weakness of the philosophy originally advanced to justify the democratic movement was that it took individuality to be something given ready-made, that is, in abstraction from time, instead of as a power to develop.”

John Dewey

Time and Individuality (1940)

Faith , Idea , Time

“Surrender of individuality by the many to someone who is taken to be a superindividual explains the retrograde movement of society. Dictatorships and totalitarian states, and belief in the inevitability of this or that result coming to pass are, strange as it may sound, ways of denying the reality of time and the creativeness of the individual.”

John Dewey

Time and Individuality (1940)

Way , Reality , Time

“A philosophy has no private store of knowledge or methods for attaining truth, so it has no private access to good. As it accepts knowledge and principles from those competent in science and inquiry, it accepts the goods that are diffused in human experience. It has no Mosaic or Pauline authority of revelation entrusted to it. But it has the authority of intelligence, of criticism of these common and natural goods.”

John Dewey

Experience and Nature (1925)

Truth , Intelligence , Nature , Knowledge

“The application of scientific formulations of the principle of probability statistically determined is thus a logical corollary of the principle already stated, that the subject matter of scientific findings is relational, not individual. It is for this reason that it is safe to predict the ultimate triumph of the statistical doctrine.”

John Dewey

Time and Individuality (1940)

“The animating purpose of James was, on the other hand, primarily moral and artistic. It is expressed in his phrase, "block universe," employed as a term of adverse criticism. Mechanism and idealism were abhorrent to him because they both hold to a closed universe in which there is no room for novelty and adventure. Both sacrifice individuality and all the values, moral and aesthetic, which hang upon individuality; for according to absolute idealism, as to mechanistic materialism, the individual is simply a part determined by the whole of which he is a part. Only a philosophy of pluralism, of genuine indetermination, and of change which is real and intrinsic gives significance to individuality. It alone justifies struggle in creative activity and gives opportunity for the emergence of the genuinely new.”

John Dewey

Time and Individuality (1940)

Universe , Change , Animals , Parting

“This intelligence-testing business reminds me of the way they used to weigh hogs in Texas. They would get a long plank, put it over a cross-bar, and somehow tie the hog on one end of the plank. They'd search all around till they found a stone that would balance the weight of the hog and they'd put that on the other end of the plank. Then they'd guess the weight of the stone.”

John Dewey

Quoted by Dorothy Canfield Fisher in Vermont Tradition http://books.google.com/books?id=K7wMAAAAYAAJ&q=%22This+intelligence-testing+business+reminds+me+of+the+way+they+used+to+weigh+hogs+in+Texas+They+would+get+a+long+plank+put+it+over+a+cross-bar+and+somehow+tie+the+hog+on+one+end+of+the+plank+They'd+search+all+around+till+they+found+a+stone+that+would+balance+the+weight+of+the+hog+and+they'd+put+that+on+the+other+end+of+the+plank+Then+they'd+guess+the+weight+of+the+stone%22&pg=PA380#v=onepage (1953)
Misc. Quotes

Way , Search , Intelligence , Business

“Art is not the possession of the few who are recognized writers, painters, musicians; it is the authentic expression of any and all individuality. Those who have the gift of creative expression in unusually large measure disclose the meaning of the individuality of others to those others. In participating in the work of art, they become artists in their activity. They learn to know and honor individuality in whatever form it appears. The fountains of creative activity are discovered and released. The free individuality which is the source of art is also the final source of creative development in time.”

John Dewey

Time and Individuality (1940)

Art , Learning , Appearance , Time

“The revolution in scientific ideas just mentioned is primarily logical. It is due to recognition that the very method of physical science, with its primary standard units of mass, space, and time, is concerned with measurements of relations of change, not with individuals as such.”

John Dewey

Time and Individuality (1940)

Idea , Science , Change , Time

“Every thinker puts some portion of an apparently stable world in peril and no one can wholly predict what will emerge in its place.”

John Dewey

Experience and Nature (1925), Ch. VI: Nature, Mind and the Subject
Misc. Quotes

World

“It may be remarked incidentally that the recognition of the relational character of scientific objects completely eliminates an old metaphysical issue. One of the outstanding problems created by the rise of modern science was due to the fact that scientific definitions and descriptions are framed in terms of which qualities play no part. Qualities were wholly superfluous. As long as the idea persisted (an inheritance from Greek metaphysical science) that the business of knowledge is to penetrate into the inner being of objects, the existence of qualities like colors, sounds, etc., was embarrassing. The usual way of dealing with them is to declare that they are merely subjective, existing only in the consciousness of individual knowers. Given the old idea that the purpose of knowledge (represented at its best in science) is to penetrate into the heart of reality and reveal its "true" nature, the conclusion was a logical one. …The discovery of the nonscientific because of the empirically unverifiable and unnecessary character of absolute space, absolute motion, and absolute time gave the final coup de grâce to the traditional idea that solidity, mass, size, etc., are inherent possessions of ultimate individuals.”

John Dewey

Time and Individuality (1940)

Color , Way , Idea , Business

“As long as politics is the shadow cast on society by big business, the attenuation of the shadow will not change the substance.”

John Dewey

Quoted in John Dewey and American Democracy by Robert Westbrook (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 440; cited in Understanding Power http://www.understandingpower.com/Chapter9.htm#f16| (2002) by Noam Chomsky, ch. 9, footnote 16; originally from "The Need for a New Party" (1931) by John Dewey, Later Works 6, http://books.google.com/books?id=0xPFJ2uwpbIC&lpg=PA163&ots=dd3ciwpXoJ&dq=%22shadow%20cast%22%20dewey&pg=PA163#v=onepage&q&f=false| p. 163. (Via Westbrook.)
Misc. Quotes

Business , Change