Mortimer Adler Quotes

60 Sourced Quotes

The person who, at any stage of a conversation, disagrees, should at least hope to reach agreement in the end. He should be as much prepared to have his own mind changed as seek to change the mind of another... No one who looks upon disagreement as an occasion for teaching another should forget that it is also an occasion for being taught.

Mortimer Adler
Erotic or sexual love can truly be love if it is not selfishly sexual or lustful.

Mortimer Adler
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 Adler
Imaginative literature primarily pleases rather than teaches. It is much easier to be pleased than taught, but much harder to know why one is pleased. Beauty is harder to analyze than truth.

Mortimer Adler
The complexities of adult life get in the way of the truth. The great philosophers have always been able to clear away the complexities and see simple distinctions — simple once they are stated, vastly difficult before. If we are to follow them we too must be childishly simple in our questions — and maturely wise in our replies.

Mortimer Adler
Work that is pure toil, done solely for the sake of the money it earns, is also sheer drudgery because it is stultifying rather than self improving.

Mortimer Adler
Every seminar should involve at its conclusion the assignment of a short composition in which students would attempt to state how their understanding of the book discussed in the seminar was increased by their participation in the discussion.

Mortimer Adler
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 Adler
For the educational establishment... test scores are treated as indications of the extent to which the required ground covering has been done.... as educationally significant. However, while they may be prognostic of a child's ability to get through school... they do not provide us with an appraisal of the child's progress in the long process of becoming a generally educated human being — the advance made toward a more skillful, thoughtful, and cultivated mind.

Mortimer Adler
If one wants another only for some self-satisfaction, usually in the form of sensual pleasure, that wrong desire takes the form of lust rather than love.

Mortimer Adler