- Source
- On the Past and Future
- Date
- 1821
Meaning of “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.
Where does it come from?
Table-Talk, Volume I, Essay III, “On the Past and Future,” Project Gutenberg #3020. “The future is yet to come” occurs in Hazlitt’s comparison of the already-existing past with the not-yet-existing future: the full sentence continues that the future “has never been anything.” The retained short excerpt is therefore part of a philosophical contrast, not a prediction, forecasting rule or scientific proposition.
