Browse 6 quotations connecting William Hazlitt with Time, with meanings, source notes and related themes.
Each quotation is included because its central idea connects with this theme, not simply because one matching word appears in the sentence.
Sources represented here include On the Feeling of Immortality in Youth, On the Love of Life, On the Past and Future. Keeping the work and source note beside each quotation makes differences in setting, speaker and emphasis easier to see.
Sources represented here include On the Feeling of Immortality in Youth, On the Love of Life, On the Past and Future.
“We make the coming age our own.”
Youth is portrayed as imaginatively possessing the future before experience has imposed clear limits, turning coming time into a field of possibility rather than scarcity.
Source note: On the Feeling of Immortality in Youth, first published March 1827. The sentence belongs to Hazlitt’s account of expansive youthful expectation and should not be treated as a literal claim of control over the future.
“No young man believes he shall ever die.”
Hazlitt describes the psychological distance of mortality in youth: death can be known abstractly while still feeling too remote to shape one’s immediate sense of life.
Source note: First published unsigned in The Monthly Magazine in March 1827; represented here through the public-domain Collected Works text. The statement opens an essay about youth’s felt relation to mortality.
“Without life there can be no action”
The excerpt connects finite existence with agency: action, pursuit and intention require continued life, which helps explain why future time matters to an active person.
Source note: The Round Table, No. 1, “On the Love of Life,” January 15, 1815. The phrase occurs inside Hazlitt’s broader argument that passions and projects strengthen attachment to life.
“The love of life is, in general, the effect not of our enjoyments, but of our passions.”
Hazlitt argues that attachment to continued life is driven less by a simple calculation of pleasure than by active desires, interests and passions that keep a person engaged with what may happen next.
Source note: The Round Table, No. 1, “On the Love of Life,” dated January 15, 1815 in the public-domain collected text. The essay analyzes attachment to continued existence rather than offering medical or psychological evidence.
“The future is yet to come”
The brief phrase anchors Hazlitt’s argument that the future does not possess greater reality merely because it has not happened yet; he compares its status with the already completed past.
Source note: Table-Talk, essay III, “On the Past and Future.” This is a short excerpt from Hazlitt’s comparison of past, present and future, not a standalone prediction about what the future will contain.
“I have some desire to enjoy the present good, and some fondness for the past”
Hazlitt states his own temporal bias plainly: he values present experience and retains an attachment to what has already been lived rather than treating only the future as significant.
Source note: Table-Talk, essay III, “On the Past and Future.” The essay appears in the 1821 first volume; the represented wording is from the public-domain Project Gutenberg text of Table-Talk.