Tag Archives: anticipation

Derek Parfit

It’s a good reason for postponing pleasures that you will then have more time in which you can enjoy looking forward to them. I remember exactly when, at the age of eight, I changed over from eating the best bits first to eating them last.

Derek Parfit, ‘Summary of Discussion’, Synthese, vol. 53, no. 2 (1982), p. 255

Jane Austen

[S]he found—what has been sometimes found before—that an event to which she had looked forward with impatient desire did not, in taking place, bring all the satisfaction she had promised herself. It was consequently necessary to name some other period for the commencement of actual felicity; to have some other point on which her wishes and hopes might be fixed, and by again enjoying the pleasure of anticipation, console herself for the present, and prepare for another disappointment.

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, 1813, chap. 42