15 quotes
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.
How to Read a Book (1940)
Above all, money-making and other external indices of social success must become subordinate to the inner attainments of moral and intellectual virtue.
Reforming Education: The Opening of the American Mind (1990)
The purpose of learning is growth, and our minds, unlike our bodies, can continue growing as we continue to live.
The Leisure alternatives catalog: food for mind & body (1979)
An educated person is one who, through the travail of his own life, has assimilated the ideas that make him representative of his culture.
Reforming Education: The Schooling of a People and Their Education Beyond Schooling (1977)
It is only by struggling with difficult books, books over one's head, that anyone learns to read.
Reforming Education: The Opening of the American Mind (1990)
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.
The telephone book is full of facts, but it doesn't contain a single idea.
Book of Humorous Quotations9 (1998)
One reader is better than another in proportion as he is able of a greater range of activity in reading and exerts more effort.
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.
You can't be a philosopher and an activist. If you do, you get all mixed up.
I find the selectivity of erotic love - the choice of this man or this woman - much more intelligible if liking the person is the origin of sexual interest, rather than the other way.
Every seminar should involve at its conclusion the assignment of a short composition in which students would attempt to state how their understanding of the book discussed in the seminar was increased by their participation in the discussion.
Reforming Education: The Opening of the American Mind (1990)
The argument for world government as the indispensable condition of world peace can be boiled down to a single proposition: if local civil government is necessary for local civil peace, then world civil government is necessary for world peace.
Philosopher at Large: An Intellectual Autobiography (1977)
A cultural delusion is widespread in the twentieth century. The extraordinary progress in science and technology that we have achieved in this century has deluded many of our contemporaries into thinking that similar progress obtains in other fields of mental activity. They unquestioningly think that the twentieth century is superior to its predecessors in all the efforts of the human mind.
The Great Ideas: A Lexicon of Western Thought (1992)
Unlike many of my contemporaries, I never write books for my fellow professors to read. I have no interest in the academic audience at all. I'm interested in Joe Doakes. A general audience can read any book I write – and they do.