How to Read a Book Quotes

“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 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.”
― Charles Van Doren, How to Read 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.”
― Charles Van Doren, How to Read a Book

“I- A Primeira Etapa da Leitura Analítica: Regras para Descobrir de que se Trata um Livro

1. Classifique o livro de acordo com o tipo e o assunto
2. Diga de que se trata todo o livro com a máxima concisão.
3. Enumere as partes principais por ordem e segundo a relação que guardam entre si, e delineie essas partes da mesma forma que você delineou o todo.
4. Defina o problema ou os problemas que o autor tentou resolver.

II- A Segunda Etapa da Leitura Analítica: Regras para interpretar o Conteúdo de um Livro

5. Assimile os termos do autor interpretando-lhe as palavras-chave.
6. Aprenda as principais porposições do autor examinando-lhe os períodos mais importantes.
7. Conheça os argumentos do autor, descobrindo-os nas sequências dos períodos ou construindo-os à base dessas sequências.
8. Determine quais os problemas que o autor resolveu e quais os que não resolveu; e dentre estes, indique quais os que o autor sabia que não conseguiria resolver.

III- A Terceira Etapa da Leitura Analítica: Regras para Criticar um Livro encarado sob o prisma da Comunicação de Conhecimentos

A- Preceitos Gerais da Etiqueta Intelectual

9. Não comece a crítica enquanto não completar o delineamentoe a interpretação do livro. (Não diga que concorda, discorda ou suspende o julgamento enquanto não puder dizer “Entendo”.)
10. Não faça da discordância disputa ou querela.
11. Demonstre que reconhece a diferença entre conhecimento e mera opinião pessoal apresentando boas razões para qualquer julgamento crítico que venha a fazer.

B- Critérios Especiais para Tópicos de Crítica

12. Mostre em que ponto o autor está desinformado.
13. Mostre em que ponto o autor está mal informado.
14. Mostre em que ponto o autor é ilógico
15. Mostre em que ponto a análise ou explanação do autor é incompleta.”
― Mortimer Jerome Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“To be equally serious in receiving such communication, one must be not only a responsive but also a responsible listener. You are responsive to the extent that you follow what has been said and note the intention that prompts it. But you also have the responsibility of taking a position. When you take it, it is yours, not the author's. To regard anyone except yourself as responsible for your judgment is to be a slave, not a free man. It is from this fact that the liberal arts acquire their name.
(P. 140)”
― Mortimer J. Adler, Charles Van Doren, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“Do not say you agree, disagree, or suspend judgement until you can say “I understand”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“In tackling a difficult book for the first time, read it through without ever stopping to look up or ponder the things you do not understand right away.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book

“A person who has read widely but not well deserves to be pitied rather than praised. As”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book

“One constant is that, to achieve all the purposes of reading, the desideratum must be the ability to read different things at different—appropriate—speeds, not everything at the greatest possible speed. As Pascal observed three hundred years ago, “When we read too fast or too slowly, we understand nothing.” Since”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book

“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

“The man who knew an encyclopedia by heart would be in grave danger of incurring the title idiot savant—“learned fool.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book

“The undemanding reader asks no questions-and gets no answers.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“beginning of this book that the instruction in reading that it provides applies to anything you have to or want to read. However,”
― Charles Van Doren, How to Read a Book

“Find and interpreting the important words.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“As E. B. White once remarked, “A despot doesn’t fear eloquent writers preaching freedom—he fears a drunken poet who may crack a joke that will take hold.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book: the classic guide to intelligent reading

“To agree is just as much an exercise of critical judgment on your part as
to disagree. You can be just as wrong in agreeing as in disagreeing. To agree without
understanding is inane. To disagree without understanding is impudent.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book: A Guide to Reading the Great Books

“To pass from understanding less to understanding more by your own intellectual effort in reading is something like pulling yourself up by your bootstraps.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“There have always been literate ignoramuses who have read too widely and not well.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“One should not have to spend four years in graduate school in order to learn how to read. Four years of graduate school, in addition to twelve years of preparatory education and four years of college—that adds up to twenty full years of schooling. It should not take that long to learn to read. Something is very wrong if it does.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book

“Happiness, as Aristotle says, is the quality of a whole life. He means whole not only in a temporal sense but also in terms of all the aspects from which a life can be viewed”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“I have seen the fruits of adult education. It can be done. And anyone who has worked in adult education knows that he must appeal for self-help. There are no monitors to keep adults at the task. There are no examinations and grades, none of the machinery of external discipline. The person who learns something out of school is self-disciplined. He works for merit in his own eyes, not credit from the registrar. (1940 ed. page 104)”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“Lack of relevant knowledge [uninformed author] makes it impossible to solve certain problems or support certain conclusions. Erroneous suppositions [misinformed author], however, lead to wrong conclusions and untenable solutions. Taken together, these two points charge an author with defects in his premises. He needs more knowledge than he possesses. His evidences and reasons are not good enough in quantity or quality. (P. 156)”
― Mortimer J. Adler, Charles Van Doren, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“To a Christian who believes in personal immortality, the writings of Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius are an incomplete account of human happiness.
(P. 160)”
― Mortimer J. Adler, Charles Van Doren, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“O esclarecimento só ocorre quando, além de saber o que o autor escreveu, você também sabe o que ele quis dizer com o que escreveu e por que escreveu o que escreveu.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“É um erro acreditar que ler muito e ler bem são a mesma coisa.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“[...] a arte de ler é a técnica de apanhar qualquer tipo de comunicação.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“Having a method without materials to which it can be applied is as useless as having the materials with no method to apply to them.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book

“A mind not agitated by good questions cannot appreciate the significance of even the best answers. It is easy enough to learn the answers. But to develop actively inquisitive minds, alive with real questions, profound questions—that is another story.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book

“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

“If you read for understanding, reading for information will usually take care of itself.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading