short typecast

Quotes from Mortimer Adler's "How To Read A Book" 1940

"I have tried to write a light book about heavy reading."

"You can be just as wrong in agreeing as in disagreeing. To agree without understanding is inane.  To disagree without understanding is impudent."

"One is hopeless about the fruitfulness of discussion if one does not recognize that all rational men can agree...the point I am trying to make is that disagreement is futile agitation unless it is undertaken with the hope that it may lead to the resolution of an issue."

"The poet has so directed our faculties that, without being aware of how it happened, we have enjoyed an experience, not of our own making but of his.  We have not received something from him, as we receive knowledge from a scientific writer.  Rather we have suffered ourselves to be the medium of his creation.  He has used words to get into our hearts and fancies and move them to an experience that reflects his own as one dream might resemble another.  In fact, by some strange manner of effluence, the poet's dream is dreamed differently by each of us."