Malcolm X Quotes

Reading is the key that opens doors to many good things in life. Reading shaped my dreams, and more reading helped me make my dreams come true.

It is books that are a key to the wide world; if you can't do anything else, read all that you can.

Some people act as if it were demeaning to their manhood to wish to be well-read but you can no more be a healthy person mentally without reading substantial books than you can be a vigorous person physically without eating solid food. Books should be chosen, not for their freedom from evil, but for their possession of good. Dr. Johnson said: "Whilst you stand deliberating which book your son shall read first, another boy has read both."

Our lives are greatly enriched when we immerse ourselves in literature and spiritual writing, not because we are going to be tested but purely for the sake of enrichment.

Learning is the ally, not the adversary of genius... he who reads in a proper spirit, can scarcely read too much.

Time passed solely in the pursuit of pleasure leaves no solid enjoyment for the future; but from the hours you spend in reading and studying useful books, you will gather a golden harvest in future years.

The best advice I ever got was that knowledge is power and to keep reading.

Books give not wisdom where none was before. But where some is, there reading makes it more.

Life has changed enormously, and I hope - I hope more people read good things.

Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings, so that you shall gain easily what others have labored hard for.

I was on my own at Wellesley, surrounded by a lot of young women who were motivated and intellectually curious. I started to read because I was required to do so for class, but I soon found myself enjoying the seclusion of the library. I came to see reading as an important way to learn about people, including myself.

My years at Thornridge probably changed the course of my life.

I try to take moments to get brain food - I read, I listen to talk radio - and fill my own self with learning.

I read a lot. I try to gain as much knowledge as I possibly can and listen to people, because I don't know what I don't know.

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.

Probably the most important piece of advice that I've ever gotten is to develop your mind. I left school very young and I always regretted it.

This habit of reading, I make bold to tell you, is your pass to the greatest, the purest, and the most perfect pleasure that God has prepared for His creatures. It lasts when all other pleasures fade. It will support you when all other recreations are gone. It will last until your death. It will make your hours pleasant to you as long as you live.

[Books] may sleep for a while and be neglected; but whenever the desire of information springs up in the human breast, there they are with mild wisdom ready to instruct and please us.

Reading is also a journey. It's a process of discovery.

Reading is the way out of ignorance, and the road to achievement.

At the moment that we persuade a child, any child, to cross that threshold, that magic threshold into a library, we change their lives forever, for the better

Reading is essential for those who seek to rise above the ordinary. We must not permit anything to stand between us and the book that could change our lives.

The ability to read awoke inside of me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.

Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel like I've accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on. Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself. Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it's a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it's a way of making contact with someone else's imagination after a day that's all too real. Reading is grist. Reading is bliss.

Books fall open, you fall in. When you climb out again, you're a bit larger than you used to be.