책을 사고 읽지 않는 것을 두려워하지 말아야 한다. 책을 가볍게 살펴보는 것도 괜찮다. 이 또한 두려워하지 않아도 된다. 사두고 읽지 않은 책에 대해 부채를 느끼기보다는 조금씩 훑어보기라도 하는 쪽이 개인의 성장에 더 큰 도움이 된다. 여태껏 사두고 읽지 않은 책이 읽은 책에 비해 훨씬 많지만, 읽은 책 중 만약 아예 책을 사지 않았다면 절대 보지 않았을 책도 많다.

The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with "Wow! Signore, professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?" and the others - a very small minority - who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you don't know as your financial means, mortgage rates and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menancingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.

― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan