How to Read a Book Quotes

“Great speed in reading is a dubious achievement; it is of value only if what you have to read is not worth reading. A better formula is this: Every book should be read no more slowly than it deserves, and no more quickly than you can read it with satisfaction and comprehension.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“When you buy a book, you establish a property right in it, just as you do in clothes or furniture when you buy and pay for them. But the act of purchase is actually only the prelude to possession in the case of a book. Full ownership of a book only comes when you have made it a part of yourself, and the best way to make yourself a part of it—which comes to the same thing—is by writing in it.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book

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

“You must tackle books that are beyond you, or, as we have said, books that are over your head. Only books of that sort will make you stretch your mind. And unless you stretch, you will not learn.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book

“... a practical problem can only be solved by action itself. When your practical problem is how to earn a living, a book on how to make friends and influence people cannot solve it, though it may suggest things to do. Nothing short of the doing solves the problem. It is solved only by earning a living.”
― Mortimer Jerome Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

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

“Men are creatures of passion and prejudice. The language they must use to communicate is an imperfect medium, clouded by emotion and colored by interest, as well as inadequately transparent for thought.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book

“To be informed is to know simply that something is the case. To be enlightened is to know, in addition, what it is all about: why it is the case, what its connections are with other facts, in what respects it is the same, in what respects it is different, and so forth.
This distinction is familiar in terms of the differences between being able to remember something and being able to explain it. If you remember what an author says, you have learned something from reading him. If what he says is true, you have even learned something about the world. But whether it is a fact about the book or a fact about the world that you have learned, you have gained nothing but information if you have exercised only your memory. You have not been enlightened. Enlightenment is achieved only when, in addition to knowing what an author says, you know what he means and why he says it.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“To use a good book as a sedative is conspicuous waste.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book

“the essence of tragedy is time, or rather the lack of it. There is no problem in any Greek tragedy that could not have been solved if there had been enough time, but there is never enough. Decisions, choices have to be made in a moment, there is no time to think and weigh the consequences; and, since even tragic heroes are fallible—especially fallible, perhaps—the decisions are wrong. It is easy for us to see what should have been done, but would we have been able to see in time? That is the question that you should always ask in reading any Greek tragedy.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book

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

“Montaigne speaks of “an abecedarian ignorance that precedes knowledge, and a doctoral ignorance that comes after it.” The first is the ignorance of those who, not knowing their ABC’s, cannot read at all. The second is the ignorance of those who have misread many books. They are, as Alexander Pope rightly calls them, bookful blockheads, ignorantly read. There have always been literate ignoramuses who have read too widely and not well. The Greeks had a name for such a mixture of learning and folly which might be applied to the bookish but poorly read of all ages. They are all sophomores.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book

“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 J. Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“The viewer of television, the listener to radio, the reader of magazines, is presented with a whole complex of elements—all the way from ingenious rhetoric to carefully selected data and statistics—to make it easy for him to “make up his own mind” with the minimum of difficulty and effort. But the packaging is often done so effectively that the viewer, listener, or reader does not make up his own mind at all. Instead, he inserts a packaged opinion into his mind, somewhat like inserting a cassette into a cassette player. He then pushes a button and “plays back” the opinion whenever it seems appropriate to do so. He has performed acceptably without having had to think.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book

“We hope you have not made the error of supposing that to criticize is always to disagree. (...) To agree is just as much of an exercise of critical judgment on your part as to disagree.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

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

“Philosophy is like science and unlike history in that it seeks general truths rather than an account of particular events, either in the near or distant past.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book

“When we speak of someone as “well-read,” we should have this ideal in mind. Too often, we use that phrase to mean the quantity rather than the quality of reading. A person who has read widely but not well deserves to be pitied rather than praised. As Thomas Hobbes said, “If I read as many books as most men do, I would be as dull-witted as they are.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book

“THE FIRST STAGE OF ANALYTICAL READING, OR RULES FOR FINDING WHAT A BOOK IS ABOUT 1. Classify the book according to kind and subject matter. 2. State what the whole book is about with the utmost brevity. 3. Enumerate its major parts in their order and relation, and outline these parts as you have outlined the whole. 4. Define the problem or problems the author is trying to solve.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book

“We do not have to know everything about something in order to understand it; too many facts are often as much of an obstacle to understanding as too few. There is a sense in which we moderns are inundated with facts to the detriment of understanding.”
― Mortimer J. 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 J. Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“You will find that your comprehension of any book will be enormously increased if you only go to the trouble of finding its important words, identifying their shifting meanings, and coming to terms. Seldom does such a small change in habit have such a large effect.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, 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.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“Enlightenment is achieved only when, in addition to knowing what an author says, you know what he means and why he says it.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“As arts, grammar and logic are concerned with language in relation to thought and thought in relation to language. That is why skill in both reading and writing is gained through these arts.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book

“Every book should be read no more slowly than it deserves, and no more quickly than you can read it with satisfaction and comprehension.”
― Charles Van Doren, How to Read a Book

“The characteristics of this kind of reading are perhaps summed up in the word “orthodox,” which is almost always applicable. The word comes from two Greek roots, meaning “right opinion.” These are books for which there is one and only one right reading; any other reading or interpretation is fraught with peril, from the loss of an “A” to the damnation of one’s soul. This characteristic carries with it an obligation. The faithful reader of a canonical book is obliged to make sense out of it and to find it true in one or another sense of “true.” If he cannot do this by himself, he is obliged to go to someone who can. This may be a priest or a rabbi, or it may be his superior in the party hierarchy, or it may be his professor. In any case, he is obliged to accept the resolution of his problem that is offered him. He reads essentially without freedom; but in return for this he gains a kind of satisfaction that is possibly never obtained when reading other books.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“The rules for reading yourself to sleep are easier to follow than are the rules for staying awake while reading. Get into bed in a comfortable position, make sure the light is inadequate enough to cause slight eyestrain, choose a book that is either terribly difficult or terribly boring—in any event, one that you do not really care whether you read or not—and you will be asleep in a few minutes. Those who are experts in relaxing with a book do not have to wait for nightfall. A comfortable chair in the library will do any time”
― Mortimer J. Adler , How To Read A Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“...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 J. Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“You cannot begin to deal with terms, propositions, and arguments—the elements of thought—until you can penetrate beneath the surface of language.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book