2 quotations linked to On the Feeling of Immortality in Youth by or associated with William Hazlitt, with source notes, explanations and related topics.
Youth, mortality, future expectation, aging and the changing subjective value of time.
Use these links when you want to inspect the wording in its wider work or edition.
“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.
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.
‘On the Feeling of Immortality in Youth,’ opening of the essay first published unsigned in The Monthly Magazine, March 1827, represented in The Collected Works of William Hazlitt, Volume XII, Project Gutenberg #72206. ‘No young man believes he shall ever die’ opens Hazlitt's rhetorical account of youth's felt distance from mortality; it is historical essay reflection, not a literal claim about every young person.
