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Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.
Mortimer Adler
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Fame does not tarnish as honor does when it is unmerited.
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True freedom is impossible without a mind made free by discipline.
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The telephone book is full of facts, but it doesn't contain a single idea.
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You can't be a philosopher and an activist. If you do, you get all mixed up.
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Not to engage in this pursuit of ideas is to live like ants instead of like men.
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Wonder is the beginning of wisdom in learning from books as well as from nature.
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Erotic or sexual love can truly be love if it is not selfishly sexual or lustful.
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To agree without understanding is inane. To disagree without understanding is impudent.
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The truly great books are the few books that are over everybody's head all of the time.
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Ask others about themselves, at the same time, be on guard not to talk too much about yourself.
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It is only by struggling with difficult books, books over one's head, that anyone learns to read.
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The great authors were great readers, and one way to understand them is to read the books they read.
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The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually does not know what he thinks.
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The purpose of learning is growth, and our minds, unlike our bodies, can continue growing as we continue to live.
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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.
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One reader is better than another in proportion as he is able of a greater range of activity in reading and exerts more effort.
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Even when you have been somewhat enlightened by what you have read, you are called upon to continue the search for significance.
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An educated person is one who, through the travail of his own life, has assimilated the ideas that make him representative of his culture.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Above all, money-making and other external indices of social success must become subordinate to the inner attainments of moral and intellectual virtue.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
Quote of the day
Good authors, too, who once knew better words Now only use four-letter words Writing prose — Anything goes.
Cole Porter
Mortimer Adler
Creative Commons
Born:
December 28, 1902
Died:
June 28, 2001
(aged 98)
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