How to Read a Book Quotes

“The four questions stated above summarize the whole obligation of a reader. They apply to anything worth reading—a book or an article or even an advertisement.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book

“4. WHAT OF IT? If the book has given you information, you must ask about its significance. Why does the author think it is important to know these things? Is it important to you to know them? And if the book has not only informed you, but also enlightened you, it is necessary to seek further enlightenment by asking what else follows, what is further implied or suggested”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book

“3. IS THE BOOK TRUE, IN WHOLE OR PART?”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book

“1. WHAT IS THE BOOK ABOUT AS A WHOLE?”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book

“6. Finally, TURN THE PAGES, DIPPING IN HERE AND THERE, READING A PARAGRAPH OR TWO, SOMETIMES SEVERAL PAGES IN SEQUENCE, NEVER MORE THAN THAT.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book

“5. From your general and still rather vague knowledge of the book’s contents, LOOK NOW AT THE CHAPTERS THAT SEEM TO BE PIVOTAL TO ITS ARGUMENT”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book

“4. If the book is a new one with a dust jacket, READ THE PUBLISHER’S BLURB.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book

“1. LOOK AT THE TITLE PAGE AND, IF THE BOOK HAS ONE, AT ITS PREFACE.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book

“Skimming or pre-reading is the first sublevel of inspectional reading. Your main aim is to discover whether the book requires a more careful reading.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book

“Analytical reading is preeminently for the sake of understanding”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book

“Analytical reading is thorough reading, complete reading, or good reading—the best reading you can do.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book

“knowledge can be communicated and that discussion can result in learning.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book

“An expository book is one that conveys knowledge primarily, “knowledge” being construed broadly.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book

“In America, at least, the so-called ABC method was dominant throughout most of the nineteenth century. Children were taught to sound out the letters of the alphabet individually—hence the name of this method—and to combine them in syllables, first two letters at a time and then three and four, whether the syllables so constructed were meaningful or not. Thus, syllables such as ab, ac, ad, ib, ic were practiced for the sake of mastery of the language. When a child could name all of a determined number of combinations, he was said to know his ABC’s.”
― Charles Van Doren, How to Read a Book: the classic guide to intelligent reading

“urban”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book

“effectively? Yes and no. Up to the fifth and sixth grade, reading, on the whole, is effectively taught and well learned. To that level”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book

“It is relatively easy to think of and be conscious of physical acts. It is much harder to think of mental acts, as the beginning analytical reader must do; in a sense, he is thinking about his own thoughts. Most of us are unaccustomed to doing this. Nevertheless, it can be done, and a person who does it cannot help learning to read much better.
(P. 55)”
― Mortimer J. Adler, Charles Van Doren, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“The vice of "verbalism" can be defined as the bad habit of using words without regard for the thoughts they should convey and without awareness of the experiences to which they should refer. It is playing with words. As the two tests we have suggested indicate, "verbalism" is the besetting sin of those who fail to read analytically. Such readers never get beyond the words. They possess what they read as a verbal memory that they can recite emptily. (P. 127)”
― Mortimer J. Adler, Charles Van Doren, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“Obviously, not everything can be proved, just as not everything can be defined. If every proposition had to be proved, there would be no beginning to any proof. Such things as axioms and assumptions or postulates are needed for the proof of other propositions. If these other propositons are proved, they can, of course, be used as premises in further proofs. (P. 131)”
― Mortimer J. Adler, Charles Van Doren, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“The point we are trying to make is that disagreement is futile agitation unless it is undertaken with the hope that it may lead to the resolution of an issue. These two facts, that people do disagree and can agree, arise from the complexity of human nature. Men are rational animals. Their rationality is the source of their power to agree. Their animality, and the imperfections of their reason that it entails, is the cause of most of the disagreements that occur. Men are creatures of passion and prejudice. (P. 146)”
― Mortimer J. Adler, Charles Van Doren, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“The trouble is that many people regard disagreement as unrelated to either teaching or being taught. They think that everything is just a matter of opinion. I have mine, and you have yours; and our right to our opinions is as inviolable as our right to private property. On such a view, communication cannot be profitable if the profit to be gained is an increase in knowledge. Conversation is hardly better than a ping-pong game of opposed opinions, a game in which no one keeps score, no one wins, and everyone is satisfied because he does not lose—that is, he ends up holding the same opinions he started with. (P. 147)”
― Mortimer J. Adler, Charles Van Doren, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“If you have not been able to read a book sympathetically, your disagreement with it is probably more contentious than civil
(P. 152)”
― Mortimer J. Adler, Charles Van Doren, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“Many persons believe that they know how to read because they read at different speeds. But they pause and go slow over the wrong sentences. They pause over the sentences that interest them rather than the ones that puzzle them.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book

“strict mathematical form, with propositions, proofs, corollaries, lemmas, scholiums, and the like. However, the subject matter of metaphysics and of morals is not very satisfactorily”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book

“adopted by Nietzsche in such works as Thus Spake Zarathustra and by certain modern French philosophers. The popularity of this style during the past century is perhaps owing to the great interest, among Western readers, in the”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book

“you can train yourself to follow as it moves more and more quickly across and down the page. You can do this yourself. Place your thumb and”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book

“Chronos is the Greek word for time, topos”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book

“What are the conditions under which this kind of reading—reading for understanding—takes place? There are two. First, there is initial inequality in understanding. The writer must be “superior” to the reader in understanding, and his book must convey in readable form the insights he possesses and his potential readers lack. Second, the reader must be able to overcome this inequality in some degree, seldom perhaps fully, but always approaching equality with the writer. To the extent that equality is approached, clarity of communication is achieved.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book

“Without external help of any sort, you go to work on the book. With nothing but the power of your own mind, you operate on the symbols before you in such a way that you gradually lift yourself from a state of understanding less to one of understanding more. Such elevation, accomplished by the mind working on a book, is highly skilled reading, the kind of reading that a book which challenges your understanding deserves.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book

“The writer isn’t trying not to be caught, although it sometimes seems so. Successful communication occurs in any case where what the writer wanted to have received finds its way into the reader’s possession. The writer’s skill and the reader’s skill converge upon a common end.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book