Quote

All books will become light in proportion as you find light in them.

Mortimer Adler

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Mortimer Adler
Age: 98 †
Born: 1902
Born: December 28
Died: 2001
Died: June 28
Philosopher
Teacher
University Teacher
Writer
New York City
New York
Mortimer J. Adler
Mortimer Adler
Become
Find
Book
Proportion
Books
Light

More quotes by Mortimer Adler

Image
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.
Mortimer Adler
Image
Books are absent teachers.
Mortimer Adler
Image
All genuine learning is active, not passive.
Mortimer Adler
Image
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.
Mortimer Adler
Image
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.
Mortimer Adler
Image
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 Adler
Image
Emancipation of human labor from economic servitude and exploitation, i.e., from organizations of production in which the conditions of work are determined by a master class who own the means of production, and in which the fruits of work are alienated from workers to the benefit of masters.
Mortimer Adler
Image
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.
Mortimer Adler
Image
Angels are not merely forms of extraterrestrial intelligence. They are forms of extra-cosmic intelligence.
Mortimer Adler
Image
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.
Mortimer Adler
Image
Sometimes it feels like I'm thinking against the wind.
Mortimer Adler
Image
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 Adler
Image
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.
Mortimer Adler
Image
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 Adler
Image
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.
Mortimer Adler
Image
Let me roughly divide books into those which compete with the movies and those with which the movies cannot compete. They are the books that can elevate or instruct. If they are fine works of fiction, they can deepen your appreciation of human life. If they are serious works of nonfiction, they can inform or enlighten you.
Mortimer Adler
Image
Freud's view is that all love is sexual in its origin or its basis. Even those loves which do not appear to be sexual or erotic have a sexual root or core. They are all sublimations of the sexual instinct.
Mortimer Adler
Image
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 Adler
Image
To agree without understanding is inane. To disagree without understanding is impudent.
Mortimer Adler
Image
... The person who, at any stage of a conversation, disagrees, should at least hope to reach agreement in the end. He should be as much prepared to have his own mind changed as seek to change the mind of another ... No one who looks upon disagreement as an occasion for teaching another should forget that it is also an occasion for being taught.
Mortimer Adler