Mortimer Adler - How to Read a Book (1940)

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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
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
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 ability to retain a child's view of the world with at the same time a mature understanding of what it means to retain it, is extremely rare — and a person who has these qualities is likely to be able to contribute something really important to our thinking.

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

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

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
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
Always keep in mind that an article of faith is not something that the faithful assume. Faith, for those who have it, is the most certain form of knowledge, not a tentative opinion.

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

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

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
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
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 an analysis yourself.

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
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
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
It is obvious that teaching is a very special art, sharing with only two other arts, agriculture and medicine, an exceptionally important characteristic A doctor may do many things for his patient, but in the final analysis, it is the patient himself who must get well, grow in health. The farmer does many things for his plants or animals, but in the final analysis, it is they that must grow in size and excellence. Similarly, although the teacher may help his student in many ways, it is the student himself who must do the learning. Knowledge must grow in his mind if learning is to take place.

Mortimer Adler
A good book can teach you about the world and about yourself. You learn more than how to read better; you also learn more about life. You become wiser. Not just more knowledgeable — books that provide nothing but information can produce that result. But wiser, in the sense that you are more deeply aware of the great and enduring truths of human life.

Mortimer Adler
The best protection against propaganda of any sort is the recognition of it for what it is. 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. Propaganda taken in that way is like a drug you do not know you are swallowing. The effect is mysterious; you do not know afterwards why you feel or think the way you do.

Mortimer Adler
There are genuine mysteries in the world that mark the limits of human knowing and thinking. Wisdom is fortified, not destroyed, by understanding its limitations. Ignorance does not make a fool as surely as self-deception.

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
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