A couple of guys that I read regularly like typing or writing out their favourite quotes from books that they’ve read, for reference, inspiration and the like. I think it’s a good idea, and I’m going to do the same. Eventually I’ll consolidate them all into one page on this site, but for now, here’s a few of my favourites to get started with. These are all from The Autobiography of Malcolm X.
"Malcolm's life finally demonstrates difficult and perennially unfashionable notion that people are not fixed or closed products of their circumstances."
"Children have a lesson adults needs to learn, to not be ashamed of falling, but to get up and try again. Most of us adults are so afraid, so cautious, so "safe", and therefore so shrinking and rigid and afraid that it is why so many humans fail. Most middle-aged adults have resigned themselves to failure."
"Anyone who wants to follow me and my movement has got to be ready to go to jail, to the hospital, and to the cemetery before he can be truly free."
"All I had done was to improve on their strategy, and it was the beginning of a very important lesson in life - that any time you find someone more successful than you are, especially when you're both engaged in the same business - you know they're doing something that you aren't."
"I was going through the hardest thing, also the greatest thing, for any human being to do; to accept that which is already within you, and around you."
"My homemade education gave me, with every additional book that I read, a little bit more sensitivity to the deafness, dumbness and blindness that was afflicting the black race in America. Not long ago, an English writer telephoned me from London, asking questions. One was, ‘What’s your alma mater?’ I told him, ‘Books.’"
"'Don't condemn if you see a person has a glass of dirty water,' [Mr Muhammed] said, 'just show them the clean glass of water that you have. When they inspect it, you won't have to say that yours is better.'"
My favourite quote in bold. This is a great book, one that I should probably read again some time. I'll put it back in the ever-growing pile next to my bed. More book quotes to come soon.