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.
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 one is so old as to think that he may not live a year.”
Even late in life people naturally continue to imagine a future, which helps explain why worthwhile work and planning do not simply stop with age.
Cato on Old Age, Shuckburgh translation, in a passage about older people planting for those who come after them.
“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.
The Round Table, No. 1, ‘On the Love of Life,’ dated 15 January 1815 in the represented collected text, Project Gutenberg #55932. The sentence opens Hazlitt's argument that attachment to life is driven more by active passions than by present enjoyment and is immediately followed by ‘Without life there can be no action.’ It is philosophical-psychological essay argument, not modern clinical evidence.
“Life is a boundless privilege.”
The sentence frames existence as abundant possibility rather than mere duration, encouraging attention to what can still be learned, attempted, appreciated, and created.
The Conduct of Life; Emerson uses the line while describing life as an expanding field of experience rather than a narrowly fixed allotment.
“Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be,”
Browning’s dramatic speaker frames aging not merely as decline but as part of a larger spiritual development in which later life can complete what youth only begins.
“Rabbi Ben Ezra” (1864), represented in Project Gutenberg #59123, The Works of Robert Browning. The poem speaks through Browning’s imagined Rabbi Ben Ezra and is explicitly theistic; its confidence about age and providence is poetic-religious argument rather than a factual guarantee about later life.
“Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence.”
Wonder does not disappear when circumstances are limited; attention can still discover interest and meaning in conditions others might dismiss.
The Story of My Life; Keller reflects on finding experience and interest even within darkness and silence.
“But what a mockery our life would be, without a greater future!”
Hope for a larger future gives present life direction, even though the surrounding parable also cautions against pretending to know exactly what that future will be.
The Madman, parable of the pomegranate; one voice insists that life without future possibility would feel diminished.
