United States pragmatic philosopher who advocated progressive education (1859-1952)

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Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes.
Education is life itself.
All genuine learning comes through experience.
Anyone who has begun to think places some portion of the world in jeopardy.
Children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society which is coming where everyone is interdependent.
Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.
Instruction is important.
Intellectually, religious emotions are not creative but conservative. They attach themselves readily to the current view of the world and consecrate it.
Intellectually, religious emotions are not creative but conservative. They attach themselves to the current view of the world and consecrate it.
It is our American habit if we find the foundations of our educational structure unsatisfactory to add another story or wing. We find it easier to add a new study or course or kind of school than to recognize existing conditions so as to meet the need.
Luck, bad if not good, will always be with us. But it has a way of favoring the intelligent and showing its back to the stupid.
Social engaged intellectuals must accept reality as they found it and shape it toward positive social goals, not stand aside in self-righteous isolation.
The good man is the man who, no matter how morally unworthy he has been, is moving to become better.
The self is not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation through choice of action.
There is more than a verbal tie between the words common, community, and communication.... Try the experiment of communicating, with fullness and accuracy, some experience to another, especially if it be somewhat complicated, and you will find your own attitude toward your experience changing.
There is no discipline in the world so severe as the discipline of experience subjected to the tests of intelligent development and direction.
To find out what one is fitted to do, and to secure an opportunity to do it, is the key to happiness.
We can have facts without thinking but we cannot have thinking without facts.
We cannot seek or attain health, wealth, learning, justice or kindness in general. Action is always specific, concrete, individualized, unique.

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