Time & Perspective Quote by Remy de Gourmont

De Gourmont is doing a sly thing here: he flatters your curiosity while quietly demoting it. The line reads like encouragement, but its real target is the 19th-century habit of treating knowledge as a collectible - facts, theories, systems - rather than something that bites back when you try to live it. He’s telling the overeducated mind to stop auditioning for enlightenment and start taking responsibility for what it already claims to understand.

The intent is practical, almost ascetic: practice as a method of revelation. Not “learn more, then act,” but act first and let action expose what your intellect can’t reach on its own. That’s the subtext: some “hidden things” aren’t hidden because they’re obscure; they’re hidden because they only appear under pressure, in repetition, in failure, in the boredom of consistency. It’s a critique of the armchair seeker who confuses inquiry with progress.

Context matters. De Gourmont was a Symbolist-adjacent French writer, suspicious of mass opinion and allergic to pieties. Coming out of fin-de-siecle France - a culture intoxicated by new sciences, new politics, new “isms” - he offers an antidote to abstract certainty. The sentence is built to undercut the era’s confidence in pure reason: the future tense (“in good time”) insists on patience, and the phrase “what you already know” needles the reader’s vanity. You don’t need a new key; you need to turn the one in your pocket.

It lands today because it exposes a modern loop: endless consumption of insight (podcasts, threads, self-help) as a substitute for the messy dignity of doing.