The reader, the booklover, must meet his own needs without paying too much attention to what his neighbors say those needs should be.
 Theodore Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt; an Autobiography (1913). copy citation

Context

“But there are tens of thousands of interesting books, and some of them are sealed to some men and some are sealed to others; and some stir the soul at some given point of a man's life and yet convey no message at other times. The reader, the booklover, must meet his own needs without paying too much attention to what his neighbors say those needs should be. He must not hypocritically pretend to like what he does not like. Yet at the same time he must avoid that most unpleasant of all the indications of puffed-up vanity which consists in treating mere individual, and perhaps unfortunate, idiosyncrasy as a matter of pride.” source

Meaning and analysis

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