"Not to engage in this pursuit of ideas is to live like ants instead of like men."
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Quote collection
Mortimer Adler quotes (page 1 of 5)
97 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"All genuine learning is active, not passive. It involves the use of the mind, not just the memory. It is a process of discovery, in which the student is the main agent, not the teacher."
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"Erotic or sexual love can truly be love if it is not selfishly sexual or lustful."
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"Freedom is the emancipation from the arbitrary rule of other men."
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"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."
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"More consequences for thought and action follow the affirmation or denial of God than from answering any other basic question."
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"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."
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"A good book can teach you about the world and about yourself. You learn more than how to read better; you also learn more about life. You become wiser."
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"True freedom is impossible without a mind made free by discipline."
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"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."
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"To agree without understanding is inane. To disagree without understanding is impudent."
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"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."
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"Is it too much to expect from the schools that they train their students not only to interpret but to criticize; that is, to discriminate what is sound from error and falsehood, to suspend judgement if they are not convinced, or to judge with reason if they agree or disagree?"
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"Conjugal love, or the friendship of spouses, persists after sexual desires have weakened, withered, and disappeared."
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"Unless we love and are loved, each of us is alone, each of us is deeply lonely."
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"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."
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"The purpose of learning is growth, and our minds, unlike our bodies, can continue growing as we continue to live."
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"You have to allow a certain amount of time in which you are doing nothing in order to have things occur to you, to let your mind think."
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"If you ask a living teacher a question, he will probably answer you. If you are puzzled by what he says, you can save yourself the trouble of thinking by asking him what he means. If, however, you ask a book a question, you must answer it yourself. In this respect a book is like nature or the world. When you question it, it answers you only to the extent that you do the work of thinking an analysis yourself."
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"The truly great books are the few books that are over everybody's head all of the time."
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