Mortimer Adler Quotes

Not to engage in this pursuit of ideas is to live like ants instead of like men.

All genuine learning is active, not passive. It involves the use of the mind, not just the memory. It is a process of discovery, in which the student is the main agent, not the teacher.

Erotic or sexual love can truly be love if it is not selfishly sexual or lustful.

Freedom is the emancipation from the arbitrary rule of other men.

One of the embarrassing problems for the early nineteenth-century champions of the Christian faith was that not one of the first six Presidents of the United States was an orthodox Christian.

More consequences for thought and action follow the affirmation or denial of God than from answering any other basic question.

I suspect that most of the individuals who have religious faith are content with blind faith. They feel no obligation to understand what they believe. They may even wish not to have their beliefs disturbed by thought.

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.

True freedom is impossible without a mind made free by discipline.

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.

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

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.

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?

Unless we love and are loved, each of us is alone, each of us is deeply lonely.

Conjugal love, or the friendship of spouses, persists after sexual desires have weakened, withered, and disappeared.

When we ask for love, we don't ask others to be fair to us-but rather to care for us, to be considerate of us. There is a world of difference here between demanding justice... and begging or pleading for love.

The purpose of learning is growth, and our minds, unlike our bodies, can continue growing as we continue to live.

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.

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.

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

Political democracy cannot flourish under all economic conditions. Democracy requires an economic system which supports the political ideals of liberty and equality for all. Men cannot exercise freedom in the political sphere when they are deprived of it in the economic sphere.

Education is the sum total of one's experience, and the purpose of higher education is to widen our experiences beyond the circumscribed existence or our own daily lives.

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

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.

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

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.

Television, radio, and all the sources of amusement and information that surround us in our daily lives are also artificial props. They can give us the impression that our minds are active, because we are required to react to stimuli from the outside. But the power of those external stimuli to keep us going is limited. They are like drugs. We grow used to them, and we continuously need more and more of them. Eventually, they have little or no effect. Then, if we lack resources within ourselves, we cease to grow intellectually, morally, and spiritually. And we we cease to grow, we begin to die.

If a book is easy and fits nicely into all your language conventions and thought forms, then you probably will not grow much from reading it. It may be entertaining, but not enlarging to your understanding. It’s the hard books that count. Raking is easy, but all you get is leaves; digging is hard, but you might find diamonds.

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.

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.

The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually does not know what he thinks.

Love can be unselfish, in the sense of being benevolent and generous, without being selfless.

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.

Love without conversation is impossible.

Love consists in giving without getting in return; in giving what is not owed, what is not due the other. That's why true love is never based, as associations for utility or pleasure are, on a fair exchange.

In English we must use adjectives to distinguish the different kinds of love for which the ancients had distinct names.

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

The rules for reading yourself to sleep are easier to follow than are the rules for staying awake while reading. Get into bed in a comfortable position, make sure the light is inadequate enough to cause slight eyestrain, choose a book that is either terribly difficult or terribly boring-in any event, one that you do not really care whether you read or not-and you will be asleep in a few minutes. Those who are experts in relaxing with a book do not have to wait for nightfall. A comfortable chair in the library will do any time

Books are absent teachers.

It is love rather than sexual lust or unbridled sexuality if, in addition to the need or want involved, there is also some impulse to give pleasure to the persons thus loved and not merely to use them for our own selfish pleasure.

Ask others about themselves, at the same time, be on guard not to talk too much about yourself.

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.

All genuine learning is active, not passive.

Sometimes it feels like I'm thinking against the wind.

My chief reason for choosing Christianity was because the mysteries were incomprehensible. What's the point of revelation if we could figure it out ourselves? If it were wholly comprehensible, then it would just be another philosophy.

One of the aims of sexual union is procreation - the creation by reproduction of an image of itself, of the union.

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

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.

There is a strange fact about the human mind, a fact that differentiates the mind sharply from the body. The body is limited in ways that the mind is not. One sign of this is that the body does not continue indefinitely to grow in strength and develop in skill and grace. By the time most people are thirty years old, their bodies are as good as they will ever be; in fact, many persons' bodies have begun to deteriorate by that time. But there is no limit to the amount of growth and development that the mind can sustain. The mind does not stop growing at any particular age.

Philosophy is everybody's business.