01 October 2021
How To Read A Book
How To Read A Book
The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading
Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren

Highlights

But in order to forget them as separate acts, you have to learn them first as separate acts. [54]
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We do not have to know everything about something in order to understand it; 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. [4]
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To be informed is to know simply that something is the case. To be enlightened is to know, in addition, what it is all about: why it is the case, what its connections are with other facts, in what respects it is the same, in what respects it is different, and so forth. [11]
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No matter how quickly he reads, he will be no better off if, as is too often true, he does not know what he is looking for and does not know when he has found it. [39]
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Good books are over your head; they would not be good for you if they were not. And books that are over your head weary you unless you can reach up to them and pull yourself up to their level. It is not the stretching that tires you, but the frustration of stretching unsuccessfully because you lack the skill to stretch effectively. To keep on reading actively, you must have not only the will to do so, but also the skill — the art that enables you to elevate yourself by mastering what at first sight seems to be beyond you. [48]
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The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually does not know what he thinks. [49]
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Reading a book should be a conversation between you and the author. Presumably he knows more about the subject than you do; if not, you probably should not be bothering with his book. But understanding is a two-way operation; the learner has to question himself and question the teacher. He even has to be willing to argue with the teacher, once he understands what the teacher is saying. Marking a book is literally an expression of your differences of your agreements with the author. It is the highest respect you can pay him. [49]
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For the communication to be successfully completed, therefore, it is necessary for the two parties to use the same words with the same meanings — in short, to come to terms. When that happens, communication happens, the miracle of two minds with but a single thought. [97]
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Unless you recognize the distinct propositions in a complicated sentence, you cannot make a discriminating judgment on what the writer is saying. [118]
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If you never ask yourself any questions about the meaning of a passage, you cannot expect the book to give you any insight you do not already possess. [121]
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Many persons believe that they know how to read because they read at different speeds. But they pause and go slow over the wrong sentences. They pause over the sentences that interest them rather than the ones that puzzle them. [121-122]
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"State in your own words!" That suggests the best test we know for telling whether you have understood the proposition or propositions in the sentence. If, when you are asked to explain what the author means by a particular sentence, all you can do is repeat his very words, with some minor alterations in their order, you had better suspect that you do not know what he means. Ideally, you should be able to say the same thing in totally different words. The idea can, of course, be approximated in varying degrees. But if you cannot get away at all from the author's words, it shows that only words have passed from him to you, not thought or knowledge. You know his words, not his mind. He was trying to communicate knowledge, and all you received was words. [124]
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One of the most familiar tricks of the orator or propagandist is to leave certain things unsaid, things that are highly relevant to the argument, but that might be challenged if they were made explicit. [129]
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If the book is of the sort that conveys knowledge, the author's aim was to instruct. He has tried to teach. He has tried to convince or persuade his reader about something. His effort is crowned with success only if the reader finally says, "I am taught. You have convinced me that such and such is true, or persuaded me that it is probable." But even if the reader is not convinced or persuaded, the author's intention and effort should be respected. The reader owes him a considered judgment. If he cannot say, "I agree," he should at least have grounds for disagreeing or even for suspending judgment on the question. [137]
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Teachability is often confused with subservience. A person is wrongly thought to be teachable if he is passive and pliable. On the contrary, teachability is an extremely active virtue. No one is really teachable who does not freely exercise his power of independent judgment. He can be trained, perhaps, but not taught. The most teachable reader is, therefore, the most critical. He is the reader who finally responds to a book by the greatest effort to make up his own mind on the matters the author has discussed. [139]
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To regard anyone except yourself as responsible for your judgment is to be a slave, not a free man. [140]
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There is actually no point in answering critics of this sort. The only polite thing to do is to ask them to state your position for you, the position they claim to be challenging. If they cannot do it satisfactorily, if they cannot repeat what you have said in their own word, you know that they do not understand, and you are entirely justified in ignoring their criticisms. They are irrelevant, as all criticism must be that is not based on understanding. When you find the rare person who shows that he understands what you are saying as well as you do, then you can delight in his agreement or be seriously disturbed by his dissent. [142]
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Where understanding is not present, affirmations and denials are equally meaningless and unintelligible. Nor is a position of doubt or detachment any more intelligent in a reader who does not know what he is suspending judgment about. [142-143]
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But if he realizes that the only profit in conversation, with living or dead teachers, is what one can learn from them, if he realizes that you win only by gaining knowledge, not by knocking the other fellow down, he may see the futility of mere contentiousness. [145]
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He who regards conversation as a battle can win only by being an antagonist, only by disagreeing successfully, whether he is right or wrong. [145]
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Disagreement is futile agitation unless it is undertaken with the hope that it may lead to the resolution of an issue. [146]
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No one who looks upon disagreement as an occasion for teaching another should forget that it is also an occasion for being taught. [147]
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The trouble is that many people regard disagreement as unrelated to either teaching or being taught. They think that everything is just a matter of opinion. I have mine, and you have yours; and our right to our opinions is as inviolable as our right to private property. On such a view, communication cannot be profitable if the profit to be gained is an increase in knowledge. Conversation is hardly better than a ping-pong game of opposed opinions, a game in which no one keeps score, no one wins, and everyone is satisfied because he does not lose — that is, he ends up holding the same opinions he started with. [147]
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Issues about matters of fact or policy — issues about the way things are or should be — are real in this sense only when they are based on a common understanding of what is being said. Agreement about the use of words is the indispensable condition for genuine agreement or disagreement about the facts being discussed. [152]
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Many readers, and most particularly those who review current publications, employ other standards for judging, and praising or condemning, the books they read — their novelty, their sensationalism, their seductiveness, their force, and even their power to bemuse or befuddle the mind, but not their truth, their clarity, or their power to enlighten. [163]
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In any art or field of practice, rules have a disappointing way of being too general. The more general, of course, the fewer, and that is an advantage. The more general, too, the more intelligible — it is easier to understand the rules in and by themselves. But it is also true that the more general the rules, the more remote they are from the intricacies of the actual situation in which you try to follow them. [187]
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It is of the very nature of practical affairs that men have to be persuaded to think and act in a certain way. Neither practical thinking nor action is an affair of the mind alone. The emotions cannot be left out. No one makes serious practical judgments or engages in action without being moved somehow from below the neck. The world might be a better place if we did, but it would certainly be a different world. [193]
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It may be, of course, that people deceive themselves about their ability to read novels intelligently. From our teaching experience, we know how tongue-tied people become when asked to say what they liked about a novel. That they enjoyed it is perfectly clear to them, but they cannot give much of an account of their enjoyment or tell what the book contained that caused them pleasure. This might indicate that people can be good readers of fiction without being good critics. We suspect this is, at best, a half-truth. A critical reading of anything depends upon the fullness of one's apprehension. Those who cannot say what they like about a novel probably have not read it below its most obvious surfaces. However, there is more to the paradox than that. Imaginative literature primarily pleases rather than teaches. It is much easier to be pleased than taught, but much harder to know why one is pleased. Beauty is harder to analyze than truth. [199]
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If we must escape from reality, it should be to a deeper, or greater, reality. This is the reality of our inner life, of our own unique vision of the world. To discover this reality makes us happy; the experience is deeply satisfying to some part of ourselves we do not ordinarily touch. [200-201]
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[D]on't criticize imaginative writing until you fully appreciate what the author has tried to make you experience. [207]
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[T]o complete the task of criticism, you must objectify your reactions by pointing to those things in the book that caused them. You must pass from saying what you like or dislike and why, to saying what is good or bad about the book and why. [208-209]
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An author cannot be blamed for not doing what he did not try to do. [236]
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Perhaps no modern history is as great as Thucydides' work; posterity will have to be the judge of that. But we do have an obligation, as human beings and as citizens, to try to understand the world around us. [243]
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Every branch of physical science, must consist of three things: the series of facts which are the objects of the science, the ideas which represent these facts, and the words by which these facts are expressed...And, as ideas are preserved and communicated by means of words, it necessarily follows that we cannot improve the language of any science without at the same time improving the science itself; neither can we, on the other hand, improve a science without improving the language or nomenclature which belongs to it. (Lavoisier) [253-254]
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It is a good mental exercise to pretend that you believe something you really do not believe. And the clearer you are about your own prejudgments, the more likely you will be not to misjudge those made by others. [284]
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The fact that philosophers disagree should not trouble you, for two reasons. First, the fact of disagreement, if it is persistent, may point to a great unsolved and, perhaps, insoluble problem. It is good to know where the true mysteries are. Second, the disagreements of others are relatively unimportant. Your responsibility is only to make up your own mind. In the presence of the long conversation that the philosophers have carried on through their books, you must judge what is true and what is false. [285]
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It is, indeed, the most distinctive mark of philosophical questions that everyone must answer them for himself. Taking the opinions of others is not solving them, but evading them. And your answers must be solidly grounded, with arguments to back them up. [285]