Daily Inspiration Quote by E. F. Schumacher

Schumacher is politely attacking the devotional idea of reading as virtue. The line draws a hard boundary between absorption and action: you can re-read until you feel morally certain you "got it all", or you can admit that reading is a tool and decide what job you need it to do. In that pivot, he smuggles in an economist's heresy against academic culture: comprehension isn’t a sacrament, it’s an outcome you optimize.

The subtext is unmistakably anti-status. Re-reading can be a form of intellectual conspicuous consumption, a way to perform seriousness while postponing decisions. By contrast, "define your purpose" sounds almost managerial, even slightly abrasive: pick a goal, choose methods, measure whether the goal was met. Schumacher’s phrasing borrows the logic of production and applies it to attention. That’s his larger project in miniature: a critique of modern systems that confuse scale, complexity, and busyness with wisdom, paired with a demand for human-centered, practical judgment.

Contextually, this fits the Small Is Beautiful worldview, where the real scarcity isn’t information but clarity about ends. In an era when professional expertise was accelerating (and education was increasingly credential-driven), Schumacher insists that technique should serve intention, not the other way around. The sentence also anticipates today’s dopamine loop of endless consuming: the comfort of "more" masquerading as learning. His provocation is simple and uncomfortable: if you can’t state what you’re reading for, your reading is likely reading you.