Mortimer Adler

Unless we love and are loved, each of us is alone, each of us is deeply lonely.

— Mortimer Adler

Friendship is a very taxing and arduous form of leisure activity.

— Mortimer Adler

The purpose of learning is growth, and our minds, unlike our bodies, can continue growing as we continue to live.

— Mortimer Adler

Friendship is a very taxing and arduous form of leisure activity.

— Mortimer Adler

Conjugal love, or the friendship of spouses, can persist even after sexual desires have weakened, withered, and disappeared.

— Mortimer Adler

The purpose of learning is growth, and our minds, unlike our bodies, can continue growing as we continue to live.

— Mortimer Adler

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

— Mortimer Adler

Not to engage in the pursuit of ideas is to live like ants instead of like men.

— Mortimer Adler

Unlike many of my contemporaries, I never write books for my fellow professors to read. I have no interest in the academic audience at all. I'm interested in Joe Doakes. A general audience can read any book I write – and they do.

— Mortimer Adler

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.

— Mortimer Adler

The telephone book is full of facts, but it doesn't contain a single idea.

— 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.

— Mortimer Adler

An educated person is one who, through the travail of his own life, has assimilated the ideas that make him representative of his culture.

— Mortimer Adler

For the educational establishment... test scores are treated as indications of the extent to which the required ground covering has been done. ...as educationally significant. However, while they may be prognostic of a child's ability to get through school... they do not provide us with an appraisal of the child's progress in the long process of becoming a generally educated human being -- the advance made toward a more skillful, thoughtful, and cultivated mind.

— Mortimer Adler

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

...an adequate reform of public education in our school system cannot be accomplished by anything like a quick fix. We suspect that anyone who thinks otherwise cannot fully understand the shape of an adequate reform or all the obstacles to be overcome in achieving it.

— Mortimer Adler

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

— Mortimer Adler

Every seminar should involve at its conclusion the assignment of a short composition in which students would attempt to state how their understanding of the book discussed in the seminar was increased by their participation in the discussion.

— Mortimer Adler

The books to be read should not be limited to those written in English.... Instead it should be devoted to the great works of history, biography, philosophy, theology, natural science, social science, and mathematics, as well as the... tradition of Western literature -- in English translation... Its aim should not be a survey of Western civilization, but an effort to understand the basic ideas and issues in Western thought.

— Mortimer Adler

The ultimate end of education is happiness or a good human life, a life enriched by the possession of every kind of good, by the enjoyment of every type of satisfaction.

— Mortimer Adler

Aristotle uses a mother's love for her child as the prime example of love or friendship.

— Mortimer Adler

Love can be unselfish, in the sense of being benevolent and generous, without being selfless.

— Mortimer Adler

The ultimate end of education is happiness or a good human life, a life enriched by the possession of every kind of good, by the enjoyment of every type of satisfaction.

— Mortimer Adler

Love without conversation is impossible.

— Mortimer Adler