Quotes from Mortimer Adler

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

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.

Work is toil: what one does only to earn a living. If it gives pleasure, it is leisure.

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

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

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.

An educated person is one who, through the travail of his own life, has assimilated the ideas that make him representative of his culture.

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.

Love wishes to perpetuate itself. Love wishes for immortality.

We love even when our love is not requited.

Being influential is not the mark of a great book.

Imaginative literature primarily pleases rather than teaches. It is much easier to be pleased than taught, but much harder to know why one is pleased. Beauty is harder to analyze than truth.

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.

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.

Theories of love are found in the works of scientists, philosophers, and theologians.

Ultimately, we wish the joy of perfect union with the person we love.

Habits are formed by the repetition of particular acts. They are strengthened by an increase in the number of repeated acts. Habits are also weakened or broken, and contrary habits are formed by the repetition of contrary acts.

Reading a book should be a conversation between you and the author. Presumably he knows more about the subject than you do; if not, you probably should not be bothering with his book. But understanding is a two-way operation; the learner has to question himself and question the teacher, once he understands what the teacher is saying. Marking a book is literally an expression of your differences or your agreements with the author. It is the highest respect you can pay him.

Books are absent teachers.

The path of true learning is strewn with rocks, not roses.

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.

Idling is important. Most people don't know how. They're afraid of it. This explains why they turn on the television set or pick up the newspaper. They think they have to be doing something.

We acknowledge but one motive - to follow the truth as we know it, whithersoever it may lead us; but in our heart of hearts we are well assured that the truth which has made us free, will in the end make us glad also.

In idling, the motor's running, but you're letting your mind take in anything. Things pop into it. Those are the gifts of subterranean conscious.