Jiwon Kim

“He had a sense that the deterioration he was experiencing in his focus was happening to a lot of the people around him – but he also knew that at many points in history, people have thought they were experiencing some kind of disastrous social decline, when in fact, they were merely ageing. It’s always tempting to confuse your personal decline for the decline of the human species.”
― Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention— and How to Think Deeply Again

“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 understand­ ing as too few. There is a sense in which we modems are inun­ dated with facts to the detriment of understanding.”
― Mortimer Jerome Adler, How to read a bookthe art of getting a liberal education

“The distinction between reading for information and reading for understanding is deeper than this.
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What are the conditions under which this kind of reading -reading for understanding-takes place? There are two. First, there is initial inequality in understanding. The writer must be "superior" to the reader in understanding, and his book must convey in readable form the insights he possesses and his potential readers lack. Second, the reader must be able to over­ come this inequality in some degree, seldom perhaps fully, but always approaching equality with the writer. To the extent that equality is approached, clarity of communication is achieved.”
― Mortimer Jerome Adler, How to read a bookthe art of getting a liberal education

“A reconfiguring work that opens a new world would have to have a threefold structure.

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Finally, the work of the reconfigurer would be so radical that people could not understand what it called them to do. People would need an articulator—something or someone that made sense of what the reconfigurer was up to and spelled it out as a paradigm incarnating their new world.”
― Sean Dorrance Kelly, All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age