Source identified
Read & copy the quotation
“I have some desire to enjoy the present good, and some fondness for the past”
- Source
- On the Past and Future
- Date
- 1821
Meaning of “I have some desire to enjoy the present…”
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.
Where does it come from?
Table-Talk, Volume I, Essay III, “On the Past and Future,” Project Gutenberg #3020. “I have some desire to enjoy the present good, and some fondness for the past” appears in the opening paragraph, where Hazlitt states his own lack of sanguine expectation before developing the essay’s argument. This is first-person literary-philosophical reflection, not an empirical claim about how people should value past, present or future.
