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You can't be a philosopher and an activist. If you do, you get all mixed up.

— Mortimer Adler

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Philosophy

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)

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)

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The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

H. P. Lovecraft The Call of Cthulhu (1926)

There is no governor anywhere; you are all absolutely free. There is no restraint that cannot be escaped.

Robert Anton Wilson

Every morning
I shall concern myself anew about the boundary
Between the love-deed-Yes and the power-deed-No
And pressing forward honor reality.

Martin Buber Power and Love (1926)

In the province of the mind, what one believes to be true is true or becomes true, within certain limits to be found experientially and experimentally. These limits are further beliefs to be transcended.

John C. Lilly The Human Biocomputer (1974)

Attribution

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.