“Similes, Parables and Fables” Parerga and Paralipomena
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851)
“Back to culture. Yes, actually to culture. You can’t consume much if you sit still and read books.”
Variant: You can't consume much if you sit still and read books.
Source: Brave New World (1932), Ch. 3<!-- p. 50 -->
Simon and Clary, pg. 72
The Mortal Instruments, City of Ashes (2008)
Euro Trash Cinema magazine interview (March 1996)
Interview with A Man Among Wolves: Shaun Ellis http://incubator.nationalgeographic.com/inside_ngc/2007/04/interview-with-a-man-among-wolves-shaun-ellis.html, Inside NGS, (2007)
Source: Memoirs of a Superfluous Man (1943), p. 39
Context: Reading implies a use of the reflective faculty, and very few have that faculty developed much beyond the anthropoid stage, let alone possessing it at a stage of development which makes reading practicable.
As I said, the fact that few literate persons can read is easily determinable by experiment. What first put me on track of it was a remark by one of my old professors. He said that there were people so incompetent, so given to reading with their eyes and their emotions instead of with their brains, that they would accuse the Psalmist of atheism because he had written, "The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God." The remark stuck by me, and I remember wondering at the time whether the trouble might be that such people hardly had the brains to read with. It seemed possible.
