Mortimer Adler Quotes About Understanding

Quotes about: Understanding

• To agree without understanding is inane. To disagree without understanding is impudent.

  Mortimer Adler

  Understanding, Agree, Disagree

  Mortimer J. Adler, Charles Van Doren (2014). “How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading”, p.141, Simon and Schuster

• The ability to retain a child's view of the world with at the same time a mature understanding of what it means to retain it, is extremely rare - and a person who has these qualities is likely to be able to contribute something really important to our thinking.

  Mortimer Adler

  Children, Mean, Thinking

• If a book is easy and fits nicely into all your language conventions and thought forms, then you probably will not grow much from reading it. It may be entertaining, but not enlarging to your understanding. It’s the hard books that count. Raking is easy, but all you get is leaves; digging is hard, but you might find diamonds.

  Mortimer Adler

  Book, Reading, Understanding

• 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.

  Mortimer Adler

  Wisdom, Ignorance, Thinking

• Wonder is the beginning of wisdom in learning from books as well as from nature.

  Mortimer Adler

  Life, Wisdom, Book

  Mortimer J. Adler, Charles Van Doren (2014). “How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading”, p.121, Simon and Schuster

• A good book deserves an active reading. The activity of reading does not stop with the work of understanding what a book says. It must be completed by the work of criticism, the work of judging. The undemanding reader fails to satisfy this requirement, probably even more than he fails to analyze and interpret. He not only makes no effort to understand; he also dismisses a book simply by putting it aside and forgetting it. Worse than faintly praising it, he damns it by giving it no critical consideration whatever.

  Mortimer Adler

  Book, Reading, Giving

• 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.

  Mortimer Adler

  Angel, Ideas, Understanding

  Mortimer Jerome Adler (1982). “The angels and us”, Scribner

• Too many facts are often as much of an obstacle to understanding as too few. There is a sense in which we moderns are inundated with facts to the detriment of understanding.

  Mortimer Adler

  Understanding, Facts, Obstacles

  Mortimer J. Adler, Charles Van Doren (2014). “How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading”, p.4, Simon and Schuster

• 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.

  Mortimer Adler

  Teacher, Book, Reading

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