Mortimer Adler Quotes

Reading a book should not be a passive exercise, but rather a raucous conversation.

Poor reading, like poor writing, is imposing what you already know on texts. You should go into reading to discover, not to reaffirm what you know.

No book, however good, can survive a hostile reading.

The second suggestion is to think as well as to read. I know people who read and read, and for all the good it does them they might just as well cut bread-and-butter. They take to reading as better men take to drink. They fly through the shires of literature on a motor-car, their sole object being motion. They will tell you how many books they have read in a year. Unless you give at least 45 minutes to careful, fatiguing reflection (it is an awful bore at first) upon what you are reading, your 90 minutes of a night are chiefly wasted.

Reading is important - read between the lines. Don't swallow everything.

Good readers make much out of little.

Whatever we read from intense curiosity gives us the model of how we should always read. Plodding along page after page with an equal attention to each word results in attention to mere words.

We are now in want of an art to teach how books are to be read rather than to read them. Such an art is practicable.

A book is made better by good readers and clearer by good opponents.

In reading some books we occupy ourselves chiefly with the thoughts of the author; in perusing others, exclusively with our own.

There is a technical term for someone who confuses the opinions of a character in a book with those of the author. That term is idiot.

Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider. Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only in parts, others to be read, but not curiously, and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.

I never remain passive in the process of reading: while I read I am engaged in a constant creative activity, which leads me to remember not so much the actual matter of the book as the thoughts evoked in my mind by it, directly or indirectly.

No book can be so good, as to be profitable when negligently read.

The critic should describe, and not prescribe.

What I am best at is reading a book and then writing a critical essay.

A critic is a reader who ruminates. Thus, he should have more than one stomach.

I don't think there's anything wrong with someone having to read a poem twice. Or even a book.

Those who do not read criticism will rarely merit to be criticised.

In reading, we are both scientists and poets.

The process of reading is not a half sleep, but in the highest sense, an exercise, a gymnast's struggle: that the reader is to do something for him or herself, must be on the alert, just construct indeed the poem, argument, history, metaphysical essay--the text furnishing the hints, the clue, the start, the framework.

Reader look, not on his picture but his book.

What is reading but silent conversation?

It is quite too common a practice, both in readers and the more superficial class of critics, to judge a book by what it is not, a matter much easier to determine than what it is.

I know people who read and read, and for all the good it does them, they might as well cut bread and butter. Unless you give at least 45 minutes of careful, fatiguing reflection upon what you are reading, your minutes are chiefly wasted.