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Above all, money-making and other external indices of social success must become subordinate to the inner attainments of moral and intellectual virtue.

— Mortimer Adler Reforming Education: The Opening of the American Mind (1990)

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More quotes by Mortimer Adler

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)

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.

All Mortimer Adler quotes →

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Men accept servility in order to acquire wealth; as if they could acquire anything of their own when they cannot even assert that they belong to themselves.

Étienne de La Boétie Discourse on Voluntary Servitude (1548)

Health is the greatest gift, contentment is the greatest wealth, a trusted friend is the best relative, Nibbana is the greatest bliss.

Gautama Buddha

Opulence is always the result of theft, if not committed by the actual possessor, then by his predecessor.

Jerome The Cry for Justice (1915)

Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes the dissimilar comparable by reducing it to abstract quantities. To the Enlightenment, that which does not reduce to numbers, and ultimately to the one, becomes illusion.

Max Horkheimer Dialektik der Aufklärung [Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Mortimer Adler (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.