Proust, Marcel -- Le Temps Retrouvé [Time Regained], ch. 22 (1926) [tr. Moncrieff/Kilmartin]

Dave — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 16:01:31 +0000

In reality, every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer’s work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. The reader’s recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book’s truth.

[En réalité, chaque lecteur est quand il lit le propre lecteur de soi-même. L’ouvrage de l’écrivain n’est qu’une espèce d’instrument optique qu’il offre au lecteur afin de lui permettre de discerner ce que sans ce livre il n’eût peut-être pas vu en soi-même. La reconnaissance en soi-même, par le lecteur, de ce que dit le livre, est la preuve de la vérité de celui-ci.]

Marcel Proust (1871-1922) French author
Le Temps Retrouvé [Time Regained], ch. 22 (1926) [tr. Moncrieff/Kilmartin]
(Source)

(Source (French))

Stevenson, Robert Louis -- Essay (1888-09), “A Letter to a Young Gentleman who Proposes to Embrace the Career of Art,” Scribner’s Magazine, Vol. 4, No. 3

Dave — Wed, 09 Oct 2013 12:15:08 +0000

To know what you like is the beginning of wisdom and of old age. Youth is wholly experimental. The essence and charm of that unquiet and delightful epoch is ignorance of self as well as ignorance of life. These two unknowns the young man brings together again and again, now in the airiest touch, now with a bitter hug; now with exquisite pleasure, now with cutting pain; but never with indifference, to which he is a total stranger, and never with that near kinsman of indifference, contentment.

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) Scottish essayist, novelist, poet
Essay (1888-09), “A Letter to a Young Gentleman who Proposes to Embrace the Career of Art,” Scribner’s Magazine, Vol. 4, No. 3
(Source)

Collected in Across the Plains, ch. 10 (1892).

WIST Quotations

Proust, Marcel -- Le Temps Retrouvé [Time Regained], ch. 22 (1926) [tr. Moncrieff/Kilmartin]

Stevenson, Robert Louis -- Essay (1888-09), “A Letter to a Young Gentleman who Proposes to Embrace the Career of Art,” Scribner’s Magazine, Vol. 4, No. 3