Mortimer Adler Quotes

Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn't ask ourselves what it says but what it means.

True scholarship consists in knowing not what things exist, but what they mean; it is not memory but judgment.

Good questions outrank easy answers.

The question is just as important as the answer.

You gotta ask 'why' questions. 'Why did you do this?' A 'why' question you can't answer with one word.

I remember when I was a kid in school and teachers would explain things to me about what I read, and I'd think, Where did they get that? I didn't read that in there. Later you look at it and think, That's kind of an interesting idea.

The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.

History will show you not all the answers, but it’ll tell you a lot of the questions to ask.

No man really becomes a fool until he stops asking questions.

We find little in a book but what we put there. But in great books, the mind finds room to put many things.

For some time now, I have been encouraging people to ask themselves why things look the way they do.

The first key to wisdom is assiduous and frequent questioning.

The paradoxical virtue of reading lies in distancing ourselves from the world so that we may make sense of it.

If you don't ask the right question, every answer seems wrong -

The person who wins the Nobel Prize is not the person who read the most journal articles and took the most notes on them. It's the person who knew what to look for. And cultivating that capacity to seek what's significant, always willing to question whether you're on the right track - that's what education is going to be about, whether it's using computers and the Internet, or pencil and paper, or books.

I found I wasn't asking good enough questions because I assumed I knew something.

It's not enough to have the right answers. You have to have the right questions.

The most important thing is insight, that is to be - curious - to wonder, to mull, and to muse why it is that man does what he does.

He explained to me with great insistence that every question posessed a power that did not lie in the answer.

The study of error is not only in the highest degree prophylactic, but it serves as a stimulating introduction to the study of truth.

Never write on a subject until you have read yourself full of it.

I'm just quizzical about how things work and why things are.

It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question.

There are many truths of which the full meaning cannot be realized until personal experience has brought it home.

Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers.