[Reading] becomes dangerous ... when, instead of awakening us to the personal life of the mind, reading tends to take its place, when the truth no longer appeals to us as an ideal which we can realize only by the intimate progress of our own thought and the efforts of our own heart, but as something material, deposited between the leaves of books like a honey fully prepared by others and which we need only take the trouble to reach down from the shelves of libraries and then sample passively in a perfect repose of mind and body.
Marcel Proust, Days of Reading, Penguin