John Dewey: “The forest cannot be seen for the trees nor the trees for the forest.”

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The forest cannot be seen for the trees nor the trees for the forest.

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John Dewey

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Dewey uses this metaphor to illustrate how focusing too closely on details can obscure the bigger picture.

More from John Dewey

Signs and symbols, language, are the means of communication by which a fraternally shared experience is ushered in and sustained.

If the technological age can provide mankind with a firm and general basis of material security, it will be absorbed in a humane age.

But the wingèd words of conversation in immediate intercourse have a vital import lacking in the fixed and frozen words of written speech.

Ideas which are not communicated, shared, and reborn in expression are but soliloquy, and soliloquy is but broken and imperfect thought.