| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Koran: that thou shouldst forge against us something else, and then they
would have taken thee for a friend; and had it not been that we
stablished thee, thou wouldst have well-nigh leant towards them a
little then would we have made thee taste of torment both of life
and death, then thou wouldst not have found against us any helper.
And they well-nigh enticed thee away from the land, to turn thee out
therefrom; but then- they should not have tarried after thee except
a little.
[This is] the course of those of our prophets whom we have sent
before thee; and thou shalt find no change in our course.
Be thou steadfast in prayer from the declining of the sun until
The Koran |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Lily of the Valley by Honore de Balzac: house of my sister who had just married the Marquis de Listomere, son
of the old lady in the Ile St. Louis, I gradually came to know the
influential personages of the Faubourg St. Germain.
Henriette herself put me at the heart of the circle then called "le
Petit Chateau" by the help of her great-aunt, the Princesse de
Blamont-Chauvry, to whom she wrote so warmly in my behalf that the
princess immediately sent for me. I cultivated her and contrived to
please her, and she became, not my protectress but a friend, in whose
kindness there was something maternal. The old lady took pains to make
me intimate with her daughter Madame d'Espard, with the Duchesse de
Langeais, the Vicomtesse de Beauseant, and the Duchesse de
The Lily of the Valley |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Treatise on Parents and Children by George Bernard Shaw: The Parents' Intolerable Burden
There is nothing new in this: it is how children have always had and
must always have their needs satisfied. The parent has to play the
part of Aladdin's djinn; and many a parent has sunk beneath the burden
of this service. All the novelty we need is to organize it so that
instead of the individual child fastening like a parasite on its own
particular parents, the whole body of children should be thrown not
only upon the whole body of parents, but upon the celibates and
childless as well, whose present exemption from a full share in the
social burden of children is obviously unjust and unwholesome. Today
it is easy to find a widow who has at great cost to herself in pain,
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