Mortimer Adler Quotes
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Conjugal love, or the friendship of spouses, persists after sexual desires have weakened, withered, and disappeared.
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.
The truly great books are the few books that are over everybody's head all of the time.
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.
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.
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.
Love can be unselfish, in the sense of being benevolent and generous, without being selfless.
The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually does not know what he thinks.
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.
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.
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.
One of the aims of sexual union is procreation - the creation by reproduction of an image of itself, of the union.
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.
Men value things in three ways: as useful, as pleasant or sources of pleasure, and as excellent, or as intrinsically admirable or honorable.
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.
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.
The teacher's role in discussion is to keep it going along fruitful lines - be moderating, guiding, correcting and arguing like one more students.
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.
Angels are not merely forms of extraterrestrial intelligence. They are forms of extra-cosmic intelligence.
Ultimately there can be no disagreement between history, science, philosophy, and theology. Where there is disagreement, there is either ignorance or error.
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.
I suspect that most of the individuals who have religious faith are content with blind faith
Think how different human societies would be if they were based on love rather than justice. But no such societies have ever existed on earth.
The love which moves the world, according to common Christian belief, is God's love and the love of God.
Aristotle uses a mother's love for her child as the prime example of love or friendship.