| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin by Benjamin Franklin: instead of being tormented with foolish impatience or regrets.
Such a conduct is easy for those who make virtue and themselves
in countenance by examples of other truly great men, of whom
patience is so often the characteristic. Your Quaker correspondent,
sir (for here again I will suppose the subject of my letter resembling
Dr. Franklin), praised your frugality, diligence and temperance,
which he considered as a pattern for all youth; but it is singular
that he should have forgotten your modesty and your disinterestedness,
without which you never could have waited for your advancement,
or found your situation in the mean time comfortable; which is
a strong lesson to show the poverty of glory and the importance
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Somebody's Little Girl by Martha Young: all desolate, and when nobody or nothing at all breathed in the
whole great big house, but one little tiny girl and one great big
white cat, with just one black spot on its tail.
The nurse that always had played so nicely with the tiny little girl
was lying with her cheek in her hand over yonder.
The Grandmother who had always talked so much to the tiny little
girl was not talking any more.
The tiny little girl was so sick that she only just could breathe
quickly, just so--and just so--.
If Bessie Bell could remember that, it was only that she remembered
the big white cat like a big soft dream. And she might have
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Alcibiades II by Platonic Imitator: to injure than to benefit the possessor, unless he had also the knowledge
of the best?
ALCIBIADES: I do now, if I did not before, Socrates.
SOCRATES: The state or the soul, therefore, which wishes to have a right
existence must hold firmly to this knowledge, just as the sick man clings
to the physician, or the passenger depends for safety on the pilot. And if
the soul does not set sail until she have obtained this she will be all the
safer in the voyage through life. But when she rushes in pursuit of wealth
or bodily strength or anything else, not having the knowledge of the best,
so much the more is she likely to meet with misfortune. And he who has the
love of learning (Or, reading polumatheian, 'abundant learning.'), and is
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