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It is only by struggling with difficult books, books over one's head, that anyone learns to read.

— 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)

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)

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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Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.

Francis Bacon Meditationes sacræ (1597)

It is not in the books of the Philosophers, but in the religious symbolism of the Ancients, that we must look for the footprints of Science, and re-discover the Mysteries of Knowledge.

Albert Pike Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (1871)

There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.

Ray Bradbury Fahrenheit 451 (1953)

People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.

Logan Pearsall Smith Afterthoughts (1931)

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.