John Dewey

To find out what one is fitted to do, and to secure an opportunity to do it, is the key read more

To find out what one is fitted to do, and to secure an opportunity to do it, is the key to happiness.

The path of least resistance and least trouble is a mental rut already made. It requires troublesome work to undertake read more

The path of least resistance and least trouble is a mental rut already made. It requires troublesome work to undertake the alternation of old beliefs. Self-conceit often regards it as a sign of weakness to admit that a belief to which we have once committed ourselves is wrong. We get so identified with an idea that it is literally a "pet" notion and we rise to its defense and stop our eyes and ears to anything different.

Conflict is the gadfly of thought. It stirs us to observation and memory. It instigates to invention. It shocks us read more

Conflict is the gadfly of thought. It stirs us to observation and memory. It instigates to invention. It shocks us out of sheeplike passivity, and sets us at noting and contriving.

Skepticism: the mark and even the pose of the educated mind.

Skepticism: the mark and even the pose of the educated mind.

...the conviction persists - though history has shown it to be a hallucination - that all the questions that the read more

...the conviction persists - though history has shown it to be a hallucination - that all the questions that the human mind has asked are questions that can be answered in terms of the alternatives that the questions themselves present. But in fact intellectual progress usually occurs through sheer abandonment of questions together with both of the alternatives they assume - an abandonment that results from their decreasing vitality and change of urgent interest. We do not solve them: we get over them. Old questions are solved by disappearing, evaporating, while new questions corresponding to the changed attitude of endeavor and preference take their place.