Quotes from Mortimer J. Adler

Reading, like unaided discovery, is learning from an absent teacher.

The tremendous pleasure that can come from reading Shakespeare, for instance, was spoiled for generations of high school students who were forced to go through Julius Caesar, As You Like It, or Hamlet, scene by scene, looking up all the strange words in a glossary and studying all the scholarly footnotes. As a result, they never really read a Shakespearean play.

Then our first effort must be to identify the actual words. Only after recognizing them individually can we begin to try to understand them, to struggle with perceiving what they mean.

In either case, you are not doing the job of reading that the book requires. That is done in only one way. Without external help of any sort, you go to work on the book. With nothing but the power of your own mind, you operate on the symbols before you in such a way that you gradually lift yourself from a state of understanding less to one of understanding more.

They are thus faced with the task of achieving a superficial knowledge of the book at the same time that they are trying to understand it. That compounds the difficulty.

Há uma sensação, hoje em dia, de que temos acesso a muitos fatos, mas não necessariamente ao entendimento desses fatos . Uma das causas dessa situação é que a própria mídia é projetada para tornar o pensamento algo desnecessário - embora, é claro, isso seja apenas mera impressão.

Se o livro lhe é perfeitamente inteligível - do começo ao fim -, então o autor e você são como mentes fabricadas a partir do mesmo molde. Os símbolos impressos seriam meras expressões do entendimento que já lhes era comum antes mesmo de vocês se conhecerem.

adopted by Nietzsche in such works as Thus Spake Zarathustra and by certain modern French philosophers. The popularity of this style during the past century is perhaps owing to the great interest, among Western readers, in the

Children were taught to sound out the letters of the alphabet individually

strict mathematical form, with propositions, proofs, corollaries, lemmas, scholiums, and the like. However, the subject matter of metaphysics and of morals is not very satisfactorily

knowledge can be communicated and that discussion can result in learning.

The trouble with life in America today is not that we work too much but that our free time is too much engaged in play and amusement so that too little of it is left for the kind of leisure activities that really are the most profitable part of human life.

Being informed is prerequisite to being enlightened.

To pass from understanding less to understanding more by your own intellectual effort in reading is something like pulling yourself up by your bootstraps.

não é verdade que todo o livro possa ser lido para entretenimento também pode ser lido para entendimento.

The first thing to do when you have amassed your bibliography is to inspect all of the books on your list. You should not read any of them analytically before inspecting all of them.

STEP 1 IN SYNTOPICAL READING: FINDING THE RELEVANT PASSAGES

STEP 2 IN SYNTOPICAL READING: BRINGING THE AUTHORS TO TERMS

STEP 3 IN SYNTOPICAL READING: GETTING THE QUESTIONS CLEAR

If communications were not complex, structural outlining would be unnecessary. If language were a perfect medium instead of a relatively opaque one, there would be no need for interpretation. If error and ignorance did not circumscribe truth and knowledge, we should not have to be critical.

STEP 4 IN SYNTOPICAL READING: DEFINING THE ISSUES

The telephone book is full of facts but it doesn't contain a single idea.

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.

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