"In English we must use adjectives to distinguish the different kinds of love for which the ancients had distinct names."
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Quote collection
Mortimer Adler quotes (page 3 of 5)
97 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"All genuine learning is active, not passive."
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"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."
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"There is a strange fact about the human mind, a fact that differentiates the mind sharply from the body. The body is limited in ways that the mind is not. One sign of this is that the body does not continue indefinitely to grow in strength and develop in skill and grace. By the time most people are thirty years old, their bodies are as good as they will ever be; in fact, many persons' bodies have begun to deteriorate by that time. But there is no limit to the amount of growth and development that the mind can sustain. The mind does not stop growing at any particular age."
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"A lecture has been well described as the process whereby the notes of the teacher become the notes of the student without passing through the mind of either."
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"Friendship is a very taxing and arduous form of leisure activity."
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"One of the aims of sexual union is procreation - the creation by reproduction of an image of itself, of the union."
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"My chief reason for choosing Christianity was because the mysteries were incomprehensible. What's the point of revelation if we could figure it out ourselves? If it were wholly comprehensible, then it would just be another philosophy."
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"Sometimes it feels like I'm thinking against the wind."
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"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."
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"Angels are not merely forms of extraterrestrial intelligence. They are forms of extra-cosmic intelligence."
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"The telephone book is full of facts, but it doesn't contain a single idea."
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"Ultimately there can be no disagreement between history, science, philosophy, and theology. Where there is disagreement, there is either ignorance or error."
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"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."
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"The teacher's role in discussion is to keep it going along fruitful lines - be moderating, guiding, correcting and arguing like one more students."
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"There is no more irritating fellow than the man who tries to settle an argument about communism, or justice, or liberty, by quoting from Webster."
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"The only standard we have for judging all of our social, economic, and political institutions and arrangements as just or unjust, as good or bad, as better or worse, derives from our conception of the good life for man on earth, and from our conviction that, given certain external conditions, it is possible for men to make good lives for themselves by their own efforts."
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"There are genuine mysteries in the world that mark the limits of human knowing and thinking. Wisdom is fortified, not destroyed, by understanding its limitations. Ignorance does not make a fool as surely as self-deception."
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"Angels are able to know and understand better than the human intellect can, precisely because such knowledge and understanding comes to them by way of ideas infused in them by God."
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"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."
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