Top 120 Mortimer J. Adler Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “You have to allow a certain amount of time in which you are doing nothing in order to have things occur to you, to let your mind think.”

— Mortimer J. Adler

52. “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

53. “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

54. “The teacher’s role in discussion is to keep it going along fruitful lines – be moderating, guiding, correcting and arguing like one more students.”

— Mortimer J. Adler

55. “Habits are formed by the repetition of particular acts. They are strengthened by an increase in the number of repeated acts. Habits are also weakened or broken, and contrary habits are formed by the repetition of contrary acts.”

— Mortimer J. Adler

56. “You will find that your comprehension of any book will be enormously increased if you only go to the trouble of finding its important words, identifying their shifting meanings, and coming to terms. Seldom does such a small change in habit have such a large effect.”

— Mortimer J. Adler

57. “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 J. Adler

58. “I suspect that most of the individuals who have religious faith are content with blind faith.”

— Mortimer J. Adler

59. “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

60. “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

61. “To use a good book as a sedative is conspicuous waste.”

— Mortimer J. Adler

62. “The art of reading, in short, includes all of the same skills that are involved in the art of unaided discovery: keenness of observation, readily available memory, range of imagination, and, of course, an intellect trained in analysis and reflection.”

— Mortimer J. Adler

63. “Friendship is a very taxing and arduous form of leisure activity.”

— Mortimer J. Adler

64. “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

65. “One of the aims of sexual union is procreation – the creation by reproduction of an image of itself, of the union.”

— Mortimer J. Adler

66. “Getting more information is learning, and so is coming to understand what you did not understand before. But there is an important difference between these two kinds of learning.”

— Mortimer J. Adler

67. “Reading a book should be a conversation between you and the author.”

— Mortimer J. Adler

68. “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 J. Adler

69. “Reading well, which means reading actively, is thus not only a good in itself, nor is it merely a means to advancement in our work or career. It also serves to keep our minds alive and growing.”

— Mortimer J. Adler

70. “The love which moves the world, according to common Christian belief, is God’s love and the love of God.”

— Mortimer J. Adler

71. “Sometimes it feels like I’m thinking against the wind.”

— Mortimer J. Adler

72. “Finally, do not try to understand every word or page of a difficult book the first time through. This is the most important rule of all; it is the essence of inspectional reading. Do not be afraid to be, or to seem to be, superficial. Race through even the hardest book. You will then be prepared to read it well the second time.”

— Mortimer J. Adler

73. “Angels are able to know and understand better than the human intellect can, precisely because such knowledge and understanding comes to them by way of ideas infused in them by God...”

— Mortimer J. Adler

74. “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

75. “Teachers may think they are stuffing minds, but all they are ever affecting is the memory. Nothing can ever be forced into anyone’s mind except by brainwashing, which is the very opposite of genuine teaching.”

— Mortimer J. Adler

76. “Every book should be read no more slowly than it deserves, and no more quickly than you can read it with satisfaction and comprehension.”

— Mortimer J. Adler

77. “Perhaps we know more about the world than we used to, and insofar as knowledge is prerequisite to understanding, that is all to the good. But knowledge is not as much a prerequisite to understanding as is commonly supposed. 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

78. “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 J. Adler

79. “First, an angel is spiritually present at whatever place in physical space happens to be occupied by the body on which it acts. It can be present at that place without leaving Heaven which is its spiritual residence...”

— Mortimer J. Adler

80. “You cannot begin to deal with terms, propositions, and arguments – the elements of thought – until you can penetrate beneath the surface of language.”

— Mortimer J. Adler

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

— Mortimer J. Adler

82. “The philosopher ought never to try to avoid the duty of making up his mind.”

— Mortimer J. Adler

83. “Good books are over your head; they would not be good for you if they were not.”

— Mortimer J. Adler

84. “Think of yourself as a detective looking for clues to a book’s general theme or idea, alert for anything that will make it clearer. Heeding the suggestions we have made will help you sustain this attitude. You will be surprised to find out how much time you will save, pleased to see how much more you will grasp, and relieved to discover how much easier it can be than you supposed.”

— Mortimer J. Adler

85. “The undemanding reader asks no questions-and gets no answers.”

— Mortimer J. Adler

86. “Read the book through, undeterred and undismayed by the paragraphs, footnotes, comments, and references that escape you. If you let yourself get stalled, if you allow yourself to be tripped up by any one of these stumbling blocks, you are lost.”

— Mortimer J. Adler

87. “The First Level of Reading: Elementary Reading.”

— Mortimer J. Adler

88. “Love wishes to perpetuate itself. Love wishes for immortality.”

— Mortimer J. Adler

89. “Do not say you agree, disagree, or suspend judgement until you can say “I understand.”

— Mortimer J. Adler

90. “Think of yourself as a detective looking for clues to a book’s general theme or idea, alert for anything that will make it clearer.”

— Mortimer J. Adler

91. “There is no more irritating fellow than the man who tries to settle an argument about communism, or justice, or liberty, by quoting from Webster.”

— Mortimer J. Adler

92. “I wonder if most people ever ask themselves why love is connected with reproduction. And if they do ask themselves about this, I wonder what answer they give.”

— Mortimer J. Adler

93. “In short, we can only learn from our “betters”.”

— Mortimer J. Adler

94. “Enlightenment is achieved only when, in addition to knowing what an author says, you know what he means and why he says it.”

— Mortimer J. Adler

95. “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 J. Adler

96. “The reader who fails to ponder, or at least mark, the words he does not understand is headed for disaster.”

— Mortimer J. Adler

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

— Mortimer J. Adler

98. “Perhaps you are beginning to see how essential a part of reading it is to be perplexed and know it. Wonder is the beginning of wisdom in learning from books as well as from nature. 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 J. Adler

99. “One constant is that, to achieve all the purposes of reading, the desideratum must be the ability to read different things at different – appropriate – speeds, not everything at the greatest possible speed. As Pascal observed three hundred years ago, “When we read too fast or too slowly, we understand nothing.” Since.”

— Mortimer J. Adler

100. “The tragedy of being both rational and animal seems to consist in having to choose between duty and desire rather than in making any particular choice.”

— Mortimer J. Adler