How to Read a Book Quotes

“Getting more information is learning, and so is coming to understand what you did not understand before. But there is an important difference between these two kinds of learning.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book

“Think of yourself as a detective looking for clues to a book's general theme or idea, alert for anything that will make it clearer. Heeding the suggestions we have made will help you sustain this attitude. You will be surprised to find out how much time you will save, pleased to see how much more you will grasp, and relieved to discover how much easier it can be than you supposed.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“In short, we can only learn from our "betters".”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“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

“Reading is like skiing. When done well, when done by an expert, both reading and skiing are graceful, harmonious, activities. When done by a beginner, both are awkward, frustrating, and slow.
Learning to ski is one of the most humiliating experiences an adult can undergo (that is one reason to start young). After all, an adult has been walking for a long time; he knows where his feet are; he knows how to put one foot in front of the other in order to get somewhere. But as soon as he puts skis on his feet, it is as though he had to learn to walk all over again. He slips and slides, falls down, has trouble getting up, gets his skis crossed, tumbles again, and generally looks- and feels- like a fool.
Even the best instructor seems at first to be of no help. The ease with which the instructor performs actions that he says are simple but that the student secretly believes are impossible is almost insulting. How can you remember everything the instructors says you have to remember? Bend your knees. Look down the hill Keep your weight on the downhill ski. Keep your back straight, but nevertheless lean forward. The admonitions seem endless-how can you think about all that and still ski?
The point about skiing, of course, is that you should not be thinking about the separate acts that, together, make a smooth turn or series of linked turns- instead, you should merely be looking ahead of you down the hill, anticipating bumps and other skiers, enjoying the feel of the cold wind on your cheeks, smiling with pleasure at the fluid grace of your body as you speed down the mountain. In other words, you must learn to forget the separate acts in order to perform all of them, and indeed any of them, well. But in order to forget them as separate acts, you have to learn them first as separate acts. only then can you put them together to become a good skier.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“The mind can atrophy, like the muscles, if it is not used.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“The reader who fails to ponder, or at least mark, the words he does not understand is headed for disaster.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“One of the most familiar tricks of the orator or propagandist is to leave certain things unsaid, things that are highly relevant to the argument, but that might be challenged if they were made explicit. While”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book

“The human mind is as naturally sensitive to arguments as the eye is to colors. (There may be some people who are argument-blind!) But the eye will not see if it is not kept open, and the mind will not follow an argument if it is not awake.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“The art of reading, in short, includes all of the same skills that are involved in the art of unaided discovery: keenness of observation, readily available memory, range of imagination, and, of course, an intellect trained in analysis and reflection.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book

“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. One of the charges made by certain modern educators against the liberal arts is that they tend to verbalism, but just the opposite seems to be the case. 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 J. Adler, How to Read a Book

“understanding is a two-way operation; the learner has to question himself and question the teacher.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book

“Reading well, which means reading actively, is thus not only a good in itself, nor is it merely a means to advancement in our work or career. It also serves to keep our minds alive and growing.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book

“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

“(…) it may be seriously questioned whether the advent of modern communications media has much enhanced our understanding of the world in which we live.(…) Perhaps we know more about the world than we used to, and insofar as knowledge is prerequisite to understanding, that is all to the good. But knowledge is not as much a prerequisite to understanding as is commonly supposed. 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. (…) One of the reasons for this situation is that the very media we have mentioned are so designed as to make thinking seem unnecessary (though this is only an appearance). The packaging of intellectual positions and views is one of the
most active enterprises of some of the best minds of our day. 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 performer acceptably without having had to think.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“Mathematics is one of the major modern mysteries. Perhaps it is the leading one, occupying a place in our society similar to the religious mysteries of another age. If we want to know something about what our age is all about, we should have some understanding of what mathematics is, and of how the mathematician operates and thinks.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“Don't try to resist the effect that a work of imaginative literature has on you.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“The student can read as fast as his mind will let him, not as slow as his eyes make him.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“Remember Bacon’s recommendation to the reader: “Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book

“Perhaps we know more about the world than we used to, and insofar as knowledge is prerequisite to understanding, that is all to the good. But knowledge is not as much a prerequisite to understanding as is commonly supposed. 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

“There is no more irritating fellow than the one who tries to settle an argument about communism, or justice, or freedom, by quoting from the dictionary. Lexicographers may be respected as authorities on word usage, but they are not the ultimate founts of wisdom.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book

“To this day, most institutions of higher learning either do not know how to instruct students in reading beyond the elementary level, or lack the facilities and personnel to do so.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book

“It is traditional in America to criticize the schools; for more than a century, parents, self-styled experts, and educators themselves have attacked and indicted the educational system.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book

“Read the book through, undeterred and undismayed by the paragraphs, footnotes, comments, and references that escape you. If you let yourself get stalled, if you allow yourself to be tripped up by any one of these stumbling blocks, you are lost.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book

“But knowledge is not as much a prerequisite to understanding as is commonly supposed. 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.”
― Charles Van Doren, How to Read a Book

“There is a sense in which we moderns are inundated with facts to the detriment of understanding.”
― Charles Van Doren, How to Read a Book: the classic guide to intelligent reading

“Human beings are curious, and especially curious about other human beings.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“Scientific objectivity is not the absence of initial bias. It is attained by frank confession of it.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“The reader tries to uncover the skeleton that the book conceals. The author starts with the skeleton and tries to cover it up. His aim is to conceal the skeleton artistically or, in other words, to put flesh on the bare bones. If he is a good writer, he does not bury a puny skeleton under a mass of fat; on the other hand, neither should the flesh be too thin, so that the bones show through. If the flesh is thick enough, and if the flabbiness is avoided, the joints will be detectable and the motion of the parts will reveal the articulation.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“Perhaps you are beginning to see how essential a part of reading it is to be perplexed and know it. Wonder is the beginning of wisdom in learning from books as well as from nature. If you never ask yourself any questions about the meaning of a passage, you cannot expect the book to give you any insight you do not already possess.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book