How to Read a Book Quotes

“Theoretical books teach you that something is the case. Practical books teach you how to do something you want to do or think you should do.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“The question, is it true? can be asked of anything we read. It is applicable to every kind of writing, in one or another sense of "truth" -- mathematical, scientific, philosophical, historial and poetical. No higher commendation can be given any work of the human mind than to praise it for the measure of truth it has achieved; by the same token, to criticize it adversely for its failure in this respect is to treat it with the seriousness that a serious work deserves.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“It is only when you try to refine the obvious, and give the distinctions greater precision, that you get into difficulties. For”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book

“Most of us are addicted to non-active reading. The outstanding fault of the non-active or undemanding reader is his inattention to words, and his consequent failure to come to terms with the author.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“From your point of view as a reader, therefore, the most important words are those that give you trouble.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“The First Level of Reading: Elementary Reading”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book

“If you are reading a book that can increase your understanding, it stands to reason that not all of its words will be completely intelligible to you. If you proceed as if they were all ordinary words, all on the same level of general intelligibility as the words of a newspaper article, you will make no headway toward interpretation of the book. You might just as well be reading a newspaper, for the book cannot enlighten you if you do not try to understand it.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book

“But it may be seriously questioned whether the advent of modern communications media has much enhanced our understanding of the world”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book

“Many readers fear that it would be disloyal to their commitment to stand apart and impersonally question what they are reading. Yet this is necessary whenever you read analytically.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book

“Anyone who fails to consult the explanatory notes and the list of abbreviations at the beginning of a dictionary has only himself to blame if he is not able to use it well.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book

“one learns to do by doing.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book

“Now there is no other way of forming a habit of operation than by operating.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book

“We must become a nation of truly competent readers, recognizing all that the word competent implies.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book

“The first stage of elementary reading—reading readiness—corresponds to pre-school and kindergarten experiences.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book

“That they often do not even reach it is apparent to many parents and to most educators. The reasons for the failure are many, ranging all the way from various kinds of deprivations in the home environment—economic, social, and/or intellectual (including parental illiteracy)—to personal problems of all kinds (including total revolt against “the system”).”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book

“Reading and the Democratic Ideal of Education”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book

“There is no inactive learning, just as there is no inactive reading.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book

“121. George Bernard Shaw – Plays and Prefaces
122. Max Planck – Origin and Development of the Quantum Theory; Where Is Science Going?; Scientific Autobiography
123. Henri Bergson – Time and Free Will; Matter and Memory; Creative Evolution; The Two Sources of Morality and Religion
124. John Dewey – How We Think; Democracy and Education; Experience and Nature; Logic; the Theory of Inquiry
125. Alfred North Whitehead – An Introduction to Mathematics; Science and the Modern World; The Aims of Education and Other Essays; Adventures of Ideas
126. George Santayana – The Life of Reason; Skepticism and Animal Faith; Persons and Places
127. Vladimir Lenin – The State and Revo”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“It is wasteful to read a book slowly that deserves only a fast reading; speed reading skills can help you solve that problem.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“we can learn only from our “betters.” We must know who they are and how to learn from them.”
― Charles Van Doren, 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.”
― Mortimer J. 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 and analysis yourself.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, Charles Van Doren, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“there must be discovery—the process of learning something by research, by investigation, or by reflection, without being taught.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book: the classic guide to intelligent reading

“Being informed is prerequisite to being enlightened. The point, however, is not to stop at being informed.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book: the classic guide to intelligent reading

“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).”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book: the classic guide to intelligent reading

“When we read too fast or too slowly, we understand nothing.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book: the classic guide to intelligent reading

“You will not improve as a reader if all you read are books that are well within your capacity. 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: the classic guide to intelligent reading

“Despite the difficulty of discovering these controlling principles, however, we do not recommend that you take the shortcut of reading books about the philosophers, their lives and opinions. The discovery you come to on your own will be much more valuable than someone else’s ideas.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book: the classic guide to intelligent reading

“The more “objective” a scientific author is, the more he will explicitly ask you to take this or that for granted. 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

“this situation, although it is more extreme in science than elsewhere, obtains in many other fields as well. Nowadays, philosophers seldom write for anyone except other philosophers; economists write for economists; and even historians are beginning to find that the kind of shorthand, monographic communication to other experts that has long been dominant in science is a more convenient way of getting ideas across than the more traditional narrative work written for everyone.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book: the classic guide to intelligent reading