19 Quotes by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren

Everybody has some secrets he cannot bear to divulge; everybody also has some illusions about himself, which it is almost impossible for him to regard as illusions. However, although it is not possible to write a wholly true autobiography, neither is it possible to write one that contains no truth at all. [How to Read a Book (1972), P. 241]

Paradoxically, however, a story ceases to be like life on its last page. Life goes on, but the story does not. Its characters have no vitality outside the first page and after the last is only good as the next reader's.

Perhaps we would all like to love more richly than we do. Many novels are about love- most are, perhaps-and it gives us pleasure to identify with loving characters. They are free, and we are not. But we may not want to admit this; for to do so might make us feel, consciously, that our on loves are inadequate.

One reason why fiction is a human necessity is that it satisfies many unconscious as well as conscious needs. It would be important if it only touched the conscious mind, as expository writing does. But fiction is important, too, because it teaches the unconscious.

The ordering of knowledge has changed with the centuries. All knowledge was once ordered in relation to the seven liberal arts— grammar, rhetoric, and logic, the trivium; arithmetic, geometry astronomy, and music, the quadrivium. Medieval encyclopedias reflected this arrangement. Since the universities were arranged according to the same system, and students studied according to it also, the arrangement was useful in education.[How to Read a Book (1972), P. 180]

Reading well, which means reading actively, is thus not only a good in itself, nor is it merely a means to advancement in our work or career. It also serves to keep our minds alive and growing. (P. 336)

There is no more irritating fellow than the one who tries to settle an argument about communism, or justice, or freedom, by quoting from the dictionary. Lexicographers may be respected as authorities on word usage, but they are not the ultimate founts of wisdom.

The causes of every human action, Tolstoy thought, were so manifold, so complex, and so deeply hidden in unconscious motivations that it is impossible to know why anything ever happened. [How to Read a Book (1972), P. 233]

The philosophical problem is to explain, not to describe, as science does, the nature of things. Philosophy asks about more than the connections of phenomena. It seeks to penetrate to the ultimate causes and conditions that underlie them. Such problems are satisfactorily explored only when the answers to them are supported by clear arguments and analysis. [How to Read a Book (1972), P. 282-3]