Mortimer Adler
Mortimer Adler
Mortimer Jerome Adlerwas an American philosopher, educator, and popular author. As a philosopher he worked within the Aristotelian and Thomistic traditions. He lived for long stretches in New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, and San Mateo, California. He worked for Columbia University, the University of Chicago, Encyclopædia Britannica, and Adler's own Institute for Philosophical Research...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth28 December 1902
CityNew York City, NY
CountryUnited States of America
Work is toil: what one does only to earn a living. If it gives pleasure, it is leisure.
Let me roughly divide books into those which compete with the movies and those with which the movies cannot compete. They are the books that can elevate or instruct. If they are fine works of fiction, they can deepen your appreciation of human life. If they are serious works of nonfiction, they can inform or enlighten you.
Work that is pure toil, done solely for the sake of the money it earns, is also sheer drudgery because it is stultifying rather than self improving.
In idling, the motor's running, but you're letting your mind take in anything. Things pop into it. Those are the gifts of subterranean conscious.
Being influential is not the mark of a great book.
Idling is important. Most people don't know how. They're afraid of it. This explains why they turn on the television set or pick up the newspaper. They think they have to be doing something.
An educated person is one who, through the travail of his own life, has assimilated the ideas that make him representative of his culture.
Leisure is not synonymous with time. Nor is it a noun. Leisure is a verb. I leisure. You leisure.
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.
Inquiry not only begins with wonder, but usually ends with it also.
Friendship is a very taxing and arduous form of leisure activity.
Freud's view is that all love is sexual in its origin or its basis. Even those loves which do not appear to be sexual or erotic have a sexual root or core. They are all sublimations of the sexual instinct.
Love wishes to perpetuate itself. Love wishes for immortality.
All genuine learning is active, not passive.