Mortimer Adler Short Quotes

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

Mortimer Adler
Fame does not tarnish as honor does when it is unmerited.

Mortimer Adler
True freedom is impossible without a mind made free by discipline.

Mortimer Adler
The telephone book is full of facts, but it doesn't contain a single idea.

Mortimer Adler
You can't be a philosopher and an activist. If you do, you get all mixed up.

Mortimer Adler
Not to engage in this pursuit of ideas is to live like ants instead of like men.

Mortimer Adler
Wonder is the beginning of wisdom in learning from books as well as from nature.

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

Mortimer Adler
To agree without understanding is inane. To disagree without understanding is impudent.

Mortimer Adler
The truly great books are the few books that are over everybody's head all of the time.

Mortimer Adler
Ask others about themselves, at the same time, be on guard not to talk too much about yourself.

Mortimer Adler
It is only by struggling with difficult books, books over one's head, that anyone learns to read.

Mortimer Adler
The great authors were great readers, and one way to understand them is to read the books they read.

Mortimer Adler
The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually does not know what he thinks.

Mortimer Adler
The purpose of learning is growth, and our minds, unlike our bodies, can continue growing as we continue to live.

Mortimer Adler
In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but how many can get through to you.

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
Even when you have been somewhat enlightened by what you have read, you are called upon to continue the search for significance.

Mortimer Adler
An educated person is one who, through the travail of his own life, has assimilated the ideas that make him representative of his culture.

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
The materialist assumption that spiritual substances do not exist is as much an act of faith as the religious belief in the reality of angels.

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
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
Above all, money-making and other external indices of social success must become subordinate to the inner attainments of moral and intellectual virtue.

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
A lecture has been well described as the process whereby the notes of the teacher become the notes of the student without passing through the mind of either.

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
The ultimate end of education is happiness or a good human life, a life enriched by the possession of every kind of good, by the enjoyment of every type of satisfaction.

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
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 Adler