| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Village Rector by Honore de Balzac: rural life, where true beneficence is perpetually exercised; where
the capacities of great and strong souls find continual exercise,
and they themselves discover daily fresh sources of admiration in
the works of Nature, and in real ameliorations, real progress, an
occupation worthy of any man.
I am not oblivious of the fact that great ideas give birth to
great actions; but as those ideas are necessarily few and far
between, I think it may be said that usually things are more
useful than ideas. He who fertilizes a corner of the earth, who
brings to perfection a fruit-tree, who makes a turf on a thankless
soil, is far more useful in his generation than he who seeks new
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Montezuma's Daughter by H. Rider Haggard: I fell to thinking of the strangeness of my present life and of how
far it differed from my boyhood in the valley of the Waveney, and
of many other things. And then I thought of Lily and wondered how
her days passed, and if my brother Geoffrey persecuted her to marry
him, and whether or no she would resist his importunities and her
father's. And so as I walked musing I came to a water-gate that
opened on to the Guadalquivir, and leaning upon the coping of a low
wall I rested there idly to consider the beauty of the night. In
truth it was a lovely, night, for across all these years I remember
it. Let those who have seen it say if they know any prospect more
beautiful than the sight of the August moon shining on the broad
Montezuma's Daughter |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Collected Articles by Frederick Douglass: Where that investigated, this has the facts. Where that walked by faith,
this may walk by sight. Where that halted, this must go forward,
and where that failed, this must succeed, giving the country whole
measures where that gave us half-measures, merely as a means of
saving the elections in a few doubtful districts. That Congress saw
what was right, but distrusted the enlightenment of the loyal masses;
but what was forborne in distrust of the people must now be done
with a full knowledge that the people expect and require it.
The members go to Washington fresh from the inspiring presence of the people.
In every considerable public meeting, and in almost every conceivable way,
whether at court-house, school-house, or cross-roads, in doors and out,
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