When we speak of someone as “well-read,” we should have this ideal in mind. Too often, we use that phrase to mean the quantity rather than the quality of reading. A person who has read widely but not well deserves to be pitied rather than praised. As Thomas Hobbes said, “If I read as many books as most men do, I would be as dull-witted as they are.

— Mortimer J. Adler

Mortimer J. Adler Quotes

Many readers fear that it would be disloyal to their commitment to stand apart and impersonally question what they are reading. Yet this is necessary whenever you read analytically.

— Mortimer J. Adler

A person who has read widely but not well deserves to be pitied rather than praised. As.

— Mortimer J. Adler

The question, is it true? can be asked of anything we read. It is applicable to every kind of writing, in one or another sense of “truth” – mathematical, scientific, philosophical, historial and poetical. No higher commendation can be given any work of the human mind than to praise it for the measure of truth it has achieved; by the same token, to criticize it adversely for its failure in this respect is to treat it with the seriousness that a serious work deserves.

— Mortimer J. Adler

From your point of view as a reader, therefore, the most important words are those that give you trouble.

— Mortimer J. Adler

Most of us are addicted to non-active reading. The outstanding fault of the non-active or undemanding reader is his inattention to words, and his consequent failure to come to terms with the author.

— Mortimer J. Adler

There is no inactive learning, just as there is no inactive reading.

— Mortimer J. Adler

Scientific objectivity is not the absence of initial bias. It is attained by frank confession of it.

— Mortimer J. Adler

It is wasteful to read a book slowly that deserves only a fast reading; speed reading skills can help you solve that problem.

— Mortimer J. Adler

Theoretical books teach you that something is the case. Practical books teach you how to do something you want to do or think you should do.

— Mortimer J. Adler

The man who knew an encyclopedia by heart would be in grave danger of incurring the title idiot savant – “learned fool.

— Mortimer J. Adler

A good life is made by accumulating in the course of a lifetime everything that is really good and by wanting nothing that impedes or frustrates this effort.

— Mortimer J. Adler

If you read for understanding, reading for information will usually take care of itself.

— Mortimer J. Adler

We do not have to know everything about something in order to understand it; 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 J. Adler

We must become a nation of truly competent readers, recognizing all that the word competent implies.

— Mortimer J. Adler

Having a method without materials to which it can be applied is as useless as having the materials with no method to apply to them.

— Mortimer J. Adler

Anyone who fails to consult the explanatory notes and the list of abbreviations at the beginning of a dictionary has only himself to blame if he is not able to use it well.

— Mortimer J. Adler

A mind not agitated by good questions cannot appreciate the significance of even the best answers. It is easy enough to learn the answers. But to develop actively inquisitive minds, alive with real questions, profound questions – that is another story.

— Mortimer J. Adler

If we must escape from reality, it should be to a deeper, or greater, reality. This is the reality of our inner life, of our own unique vision of the world. To.

— Mortimer J. Adler

The path of true learning is strewn with rocks, not roses.

— Mortimer J. Adler

The halls of academia are like the halls of a madhouse at midnight.

— Mortimer J. Adler
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