Today's Quotation

John Dewey (1859-1952) became famous as a philosophical pragmatist and expert on education, but he also wrote extensively on art. Here's a snippet from his book, Art as Experience, first published in 1934:

"The noblest man living in a desert absorbs something
of its harshness and sterility, while the nostalgia of the
mountain-bred man when cut off from his surroundings
is proof how deeply environment has become part of his
being. Neither the savage nor the civilized man is what he
is by native constitution but by the culture in which he
participates. The final measure of the quality of that
culture is the arts that flourish."