Mortimer Jerome Adler > Quotes

“In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.”
― Mortimer Jerome Adler

“Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.”
― Mortimer Jerome Adler

“....a good book can teach you about the world and about yourself. You learn more than how to read better; you also learn more about life. You become wiser. Not just more knowledgeable - books that provide nothing but information can produce that result. But wiser, in the sense that you are more deeply aware of the great and enduring truths of human life.”
― Mortimer Jerome Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“...true freedom is impossible without a mind made free by discipline.”
― Mortimer Jerome Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Bestselling Guide to Reading Books and Accessing Information

“A lecture has been well described as the process whereby the notes of the teacher become the notes of the student without passing through the mind of either.”
― Mortimer Jerome Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Bestselling Guide to Reading Books and Accessing Information

“Is it too much to expect from the schools that they train their students not only to interpret but to criticize; that is, to discriminate what is sound from error and falsehood, to suspend judgement if they are not convinced, or to judge with reason if they agree or disagree?”
― Mortimer Jerome Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Bestselling Guide to Reading Books and Accessing Information

“The truly great books are the few books that are over everybody's head all of the time.”
― Mortimer Jerome Adler

“To agree without understanding is inane. To disagree without understanding is impudent.”
― Mortimer Jerome Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“Television, radio, and all the sources of amusement and information that surround us in our daily lives are also artificial props. They can give us the impression that our minds are active, because we are required to react to stimuli from the outside. But the power of those external stimuli to keep us going is limited. They are like drugs. We grow used to them, and we continuously need more and more of them. Eventually, they have little or no effect. Then, if we lack resources within ourselves, we cease to grow intellectually, morally, and spiritually. And we we cease to grow, we begin to die.”
― Mortimer Jerome Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“The ability to retain a child's view of the world with at the same time a mature understanding of what it means to retain it, is extremely rare - and a person who has these qualities is likely to be able to contribute something really important to our thinking.”
― Mortimer Jerome Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“The complexities of adult life get in the way of the truth. The great philosophers have always been able to clear away the complexities and see simple distinctions - simple once they are stated, vastly difficult before. If we are to follow them we too must be childishly simple in our questions - and maturely wise in our replies.”
― Mortimer Jerome Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“Wonder is the beginning of wisdom in learning from books as well as from nature.”
― Mortimer Jerome Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Bestselling Guide to Reading Books and Accessing Information

“Sometimes it feels like I'm thinking against the wind.”
― Mortimer Jerome Adler

“There are genuine mysteries in the world that mark the limits of human knowing and thinking. Wisdom is fortified, not destroyed, by understanding its limitations. Ignorance does not make a fool as surely as self-deception.”
― Mortimer Jerome Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Bestselling Guide to Reading Books and Accessing Information

“The complexities of adult life get in the way of the truth.”
― Mortimer Jerome Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“If you ask a living teacher a question, he will probably answer you. If you are puzzled by what he says, you can save yourself the trouble of thinking by asking him what he means. If, however, you ask a book a question, you must answer it yourself. In this respect a book is like nature or the world. When you question it, it answers you only to the extent that you do the work of thinking an analysis yourself.”
― Mortimer Jerome Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually does not know what he thinks.”
― Mortimer Jerome Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“If you never ask yourself any questions about the meaning of a passage, you cannot expect the book to give you any insight you don't already possess”
― Mortimer Jerome Adler

“Человек, который много, но плохо читал, заслуживает скорее жалости, чем похвалы, за то, что так бездарно потратил время и усилия.”
― Mortimer Jerome Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“A good book deserves an active reading. The activity of reading does not stop with the work of understanding what a book says. It must be completed by the work of criticism, the work of judging. The undemanding reader fails to satisfy this requirement, probably even more than he fails to analyze and interpret. He not only makes no effort to understand; he also dismisses a book simply by putting it aside and forgetting it. Worse than faintly praising it, he damns it by giving it no critical consideration whatever.”
― Mortimer Jerome Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“If your friend wishes to read your 'Plutarch's Lives,' 'Shakespeare,' or 'The Federalist Papers,' tell him gently but firmly, to buy a copy. You will lend him your car or your coat - but your books are as much a part of you as your head or your heart.”
― Mortimer Jerome Adler

“... The person who, at any stage of a conversation, disagrees, should at least hope to reach agreement in the end. He should be as much prepared to have his own mind changed as seek to change the mind of another ... No one who looks upon disagreement as an occasion for teaching another should forget that it is also an occasion for being taught.”
― Mortimer Jerome Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“The purpose of learning is growth, and our minds, unlike our bodies, can continue growing as we continue to live.”
― Mortimer Jerome Adler

“All books will become light in proportion as you find light in them.”
― Mortimer Jerome Adler

“...It is only obvious that teaching is a very special art, sharing withonly two other arts-argriculture and medicin-an exceptionally important characteristic.”
― Mortimer Jerome Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“The great authors were great readers, and one way to understand them is to read the books they read.”
― Mortimer Jerome Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“The tragedy of being both rational and animal seems to consist in having to choose between duty and desire rather than in making any particular choice”
― Mortimer Jerome Adler

“Even when you have been somewhat enlightened by what you have read, you are called upon to continue the serach for significance.”
― Mortimer Jerome Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“A good performance, like a human life, is a temporal affair—a process in time. It is good as a whole through being good in its parts, and through their good order to one another. It cannot be called good as a whole until it is finished. During the process all we can say of it, if we speak precisely, is that it is becoming good. The same is true of a whole human life. Just as the whole performance never exists at any one time, but is a process of becoming, so a human life is also a performance in time and a process of becoming. And just as the goodness that attaches to the performance as a whole does not attach to any of its parts, so the goodness of a human life as a whole belongs to it alone, and not to any of its parts or phases.”
― Mortimer Jerome Adler

“A good rule always describes the ideal performance.”
― Mortimer Jerome Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“The failure in reading -the omnipresent verbalism- of those who have not been trained in the arts of grammar and logic shows how lack of such discipline results in slavery to words rather than mastery of them.”
― Mortimer Jerome Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“...The first dictionaries were glossaries of Homeric words, intended to help Romans read the Iliad and Odyssey as well as other Greek literature employing the 'archaic' Homeric vocabulary.”
― Mortimer Jerome Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“Only hidden and undetected oratory is really insidious. What reaches the heart without going through the mind is likely to bounce back and put the mind out of business.”
― Mortimer Jerome Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“Imaginative literature primarily pleases rather than teaches. It is much easier to be pleased than taught, but much harder to know why one is pleased. Beauty is harder to analyze than truth.”
― Mortimer Jerome Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“Habits are formed by the repetition of particular acts. They are strengthened by an increase in the number of repeated acts. Habits are also weakened or broken, and contrary habits are formed by the repetition of contrary acts.”
― Mortimer Jerome Adler

“...We must also realize-students, teachers, and laymen alike-that even when we have accomplished the task that lies before us, we will not have accomplished the whole task. We must be more than a nation of functional literates. We must become a nation of truly competent readers, recognizing all that the word competent implies. Nothing less wil satisfy the needs of the world that is coming.”
― Mortimer Jerome Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading