Mortimer J. Adler Quotes: 9

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

• ....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.

  How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

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

  How to Read a Book: The Classic Bestselling Guide to Reading Books and Accessing Information

• 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.

  How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

• Is it too much to expect from the schools that they train their students not only to interpret but to criticize; that is, to discriminate what is sound from error and falsehood, to suspend judgement if they are not convinced, or to judge with reason if they agree or disagree?

  How to Read a Book: The Classic Bestselling Guide to Reading Books and Accessing Information

• 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.

  How to Read a Book: The Classic Bestselling Guide to Reading Books and Accessing Information

• The complexities of adult life get in the way of the truth.

  How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

• 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.

  How to Read a Book: The Classic Bestselling Guide to Reading Books and Accessing Information

• 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.

  How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading