Mortimer Adler - Reading Quotes

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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 Adler
If you are reading in order to become a better reader, you cannot read just any book or article. 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 Adler
There is only one situation I can think of in which men and women make an effort to read better than they usually do. It is when they are in love and reading a love letter.

Mortimer Adler
Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.

Mortimer Adler
To avoid this error, the error of assuming that that to be widely read and to be well read are the same thing, we must consider a certain distinction in types of learning.... In the history of education, men have often distinguished between learning by instruction and learning by discovery.... Discovery stands to instruction as learning without a teacher stands to learning through the help of one. In both cases the activity of learning goes on in the one who learns. It would be a mistake to suppose that discovery is active learning, and instruction passive. There is no inactive learning, just as there is no inactive reading. This is so true, in fact, that a better way to make the distinction clear is to call instruction aided discovery.

Mortimer Adler
One reader is better than another in proportion as he is able of a greater range of activity in reading and exerts more effort.

Mortimer Adler
The dictionary also invites a playful reading. It challenges anyone to sit down with it in an idle moment. There are worse ways to kill time.

Mortimer Adler