On reading:

By reading. I mean perhaps something different than the average member of our so-called ‘intelligentsia’. I know people who ‘read’ enormously, book for book yet whom I would not describe as ‘well-read’. True, they possess a mass of ‘knowledge’, but their brain is unable to organise and register the material they have taken in. They lack the art of sifting what is without value…

For reading is no end in itself, but a means to an end. It should primarily help to fill the framework constituted by every mans talents and abilities; in addition, it should provide the tools and building materials which the individual needs for his life’s work…

It is essential that the content of what one reads at any time should not be transmitted to the memory in the sequence of the book or books, but like the stone of a mosaic should fit into the general world picture in imts proper place and thus help to find this picture in the mind of the reader. Otherwise, there arises a confused muddle of facts which are worthless…

For such a reader now believes himself in all seriousness to be ‘educated’ to understand something if life, to have knowledge, while in reality, with every new acquisition of this kind of ‘education’, he is growing more and more removed from the world untill, not infrequently, he ends up in a sanitarium or in parliament

-Hitler