Quotes from Mortimer Adler

It is love rather than sexual lust or unbridled sexuality if, in addition to the need or want involved, there is also some impulse to give pleasure to the persons thus loved and not merely to use them for our own selfish pleasure.

The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually does not know what he thinks.

Freedom is the emancipation from the arbitrary rule of other men.

One of the aims of sexual union is procreation - the creation by reproduction of an image of itself, of the union.

Unless we love and are loved, each of us is alone, each of us is deeply lonely.

Love can be unselfish, in the sense of being benevolent and generous, without being selfless.

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.

We are selfish when we are exclusively or predominantly concerned with the good for ourselves. We are altruistic when we are exclusively or predominantly concerned with the good of others.

Leisure is not synonymous with time. Nor is it a noun. Leisure is a verb. I leisure. You leisure.

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.

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.

Friendship is a very taxing and arduous form of leisure activity.

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

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

There is only one situation I can think of in which men and women make an effort to read better than they usually do. [It is] when they are in love and reading a love letter.

Friendship is a very taxing and arduous form of leisure activity.

Freedom is the emancipation from the arbitrary rule of other men.

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

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.

When we ask for love, we don't ask others to be fair to us-but rather to care for us, to be considerate of us. There is a world of difference here between demanding justice... and begging or pleading for love.

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.

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.

Unless we love and are loved, each of us is alone, each of us is deeply lonely.

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