Quotes from Mortimer J. Adler

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.

Being relevant simply consists in paying close attention to the point that is being talked about and saying nothing that is not significantly related to it.

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

Mathematics is one of the major modern mysteries. Perhaps it is the leading one, occupying a place in our society similar to the religious mysteries of another age. If we want to know something about what our age is all about, we should have some understanding of what mathematics is, and of how the mathematician operates and thinks.

There is no more irritating fellow than the one who tries to settle an argument about communism, or justice, or freedom, by quoting from the dictionary. Lexicographers may be respected as authorities on word usage, but they are not the ultimate founts of wisdom.

TURN THE PAGES, DIPPING IN HERE AND THERE, READING A PARAGRAPH OR TWO, SOMETIMES SEVERAL PAGES IN SEQUENCE, NEVER MORE THAN THAT.

The beauty of any work of art is related to the pleasure it gives us when we know it well.

Human beings are curious, and especially curious about other human beings.

In tackling a difficult book for the first time, read it through without ever stopping to look up or ponder the things you do not understand right away.

A mind not agitated by good questions cannot appreciate the significance of even the best answers. It is easy enough to learn the answers. But to develop actively inquisitive minds, alive with real questions, profound questions—that is another story.

Scientific objectivity is not the absence of initial bias. It is attained by frank confession of it.

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

The man who knew an encyclopedia by heart would be in grave danger of incurring the title idiot savant—"learned fool.

Find and interpreting the important words.

É um erro acreditar que ler muito e ler bem são a mesma coisa.

O esclarecimento só ocorre quando, além de saber o que o autor escreveu, você também sabe o que ele quis dizer com o que escreveu e por que escreveu o que escreveu.

Reading and the Democratic Ideal of Education

1. Classify the book according to kind and subject matter. 2. State what the whole book is about with the utmost brevity. 3. Enumerate its major parts in their order and relation, and outline these parts as you have outlined the whole. 4. Define the problem or problems the author is trying to solve.

The undemanding reader asks no questions-and gets no answers.

I have seen the fruits of adult education. It can be done. And anyone who has worked in adult education knows that he must appeal for self-help. There are no monitors to keep adults at the task. There are no examinations and grades, none of the machinery of external discipline. The person who learns something out of school is self-disciplined. He works for merit in his own eyes, not credit from the registrar. (1940 ed. page 104)

The communion that can be achieved by human conversation is of great significance for our private lives...It is the spiritual parallel of the physical union by which lovers try to become one.

If you are reading a book that can increase your understanding, it stands to reason that not all of its words will be completely intelligible to you. If you proceed as if they were all ordinary words, all on the same level of general intelligibility as the words of a newspaper article, you will make no headway toward interpretation of the book. You might just as well be reading a newspaper, for the book cannot enlighten you if you do not try to understand it.

The First Level of Reading: Elementary Reading

It is only when you try to refine the obvious, and give the distinctions greater precision, that you get into difficulties. For