Philosophy is to be understood as experience, it has to be felt rather than thought. Life before books, and when one reads, one should go to the authors themselves, rather than commentaries. Schopenhauer writes, “When we read, another person thinks for us; we merely repeat his mental process… So it comes about that if anyone spends almost the whole day in reading… he gradually loses the capacity for thinking…such is the case with very many scholars; they have read themselves stupid… Experience of the world may be looked upon as a kind of text, to which reflection and knowledge form the commentary. When there is a great deal of reflection and intellectual knowledge, and very little experience, the result is like those books which have on each page two lines of text to forty lines of commentary."