| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Father Goriot by Honore de Balzac: around them and in their own souls, waiting in patience to take
their flight for heaven, while they look with pity upon those of
earth.
Rastignac, like most young men who have been early impressed by
the circumstances of power and grandeur, meant to enter the lists
fully armed; the burning ambition of conquest possessed him
already; perhaps he was conscious of his powers, but as yet he
knew neither the end to which his ambition was to be directed,
nor the means of attaining it. In default of the pure and sacred
love that fills a life, ambition may become something very noble,
subduing to itself every thought of personal interest, and
 Father Goriot |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Vailima Letters by Robert Louis Stevenson: it's like, and don't ask me, but nobody shall say I have
spared pains. I thought for some time it wouldn't come at
all. I was days and days over the first letter of the lot -
days and days writing and deleting and making no headway
whatever, till I thought I should have gone bust; but it came
at last after a fashion, and the rest went a thought more
easily, though I am not so fond as to fancy any better.
Your opinion as to the letters as a whole is so damnatory
that I put them by. But there is a 'hell of a want of' money
this year. And these Gilbert Island papers, being the most
interesting in matter, and forming a compact whole, and being
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Psychology of Revolution by Gustave le Bon: the sympathy of Frenchmen for the revolutionary Government.
Never was rule more cordially hated and despised than that of the
Assemblies. By its revolts as well as by its repeated votes a
great part of the nation displayed the horror with which it
regarded the system.
This last point, the aversion of France for the revolutionary
regime, so long misunderstood, has been well displayed by
recent historians. The author of the last book published on the
Revolution, M. Madelin, has well summarised their opinion in the
following words:--
``As early as 1793 a party by no means numerous had seized upon
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