Quotes from Mortimer Adler

We are tied down, all our days and for the greater part of our days, to the commonplace. That is where contact with the great thinkers, great literature helps. In their company we are still in the ordinary world, but it is the ordinary world transfigured and seen through the eyes of wisdom and genius. And some of their genius becomes ours. . . in The Great Conversation

As Thomas Hobbes said, "If I read as many books as most men do, I would be as dull-witted as they are.

Don't try to resist the effect that a work of imaginative literature has on you.

Remember Bacon's recommendation to the reader: "Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider.

Every book should be read no more slowly than it deserves, and no more quickly than you can read it with satisfaction and comprehension.

Human beings are curious, and especially curious about other human beings.

In tackling a difficult book for the first time, read it through without ever stopping to look up or ponder the things you do not understand right away.

One constant is that, to achieve all the purposes of reading, the desideratum must be the ability to read different things at different—appropriate—speeds, not everything at the greatest possible speed. As Pascal observed three hundred years ago, "When we read too fast or too slowly, we understand nothing." Since

Find and interpreting the important words.

But it may be seriously questioned whether the advent of modern communications media has much enhanced our understanding of the world

Do not say you agree, disagree, or suspend judgement until you can say "I understand

A good life is made by accumulating in the course of a lifetime everything that is really good and by wanting nothing that impedes or frustrates this effort.