| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain: Tin pans and horns were added to the din, the popula-
tion massed itself and moved toward the river, met
the children coming in an open carriage drawn by
shouting citizens, thronged around it, joined its home-
ward march, and swept magnificently up the main
street roaring huzzah after huzzah!
The village was illuminated; nobody went to bed
again; it was the greatest night the little town had
ever seen. During the first half-hour a procession of
villagers filed through Judge Thatcher's house, seized
the saved ones and kissed them, squeezed Mrs. Thatch-
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Marriage Contract by Honore de Balzac: earlier emotions of life.
"That woman is fitted," thought Paul, as he left her, "to advance me
in diplomacy before I am even made a deputy."
If, in all the circumstances of life a man does not turn over and over
both things and ideas in order to examine them thoroughly under their
different aspects before taking action, that man is weak and
incomplete and in danger of fatal failure. At this moment Paul was an
optimist; he saw everything to advantage, and did not tell himself
than an ambitious mother-in-law might prove a tyrant. So, every
evening as he left the house, he fancied himself a married man,
allured his mind with its own thought, and slipped on the slippers of
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Phaedrus by Plato: fashions and adorns as a sort of image which he is to fall down and
worship. The followers of Zeus desire that their beloved should have a
soul like him; and therefore they seek out some one of a philosophical and
imperial nature, and when they have found him and loved him, they do all
they can to confirm such a nature in him, and if they have no experience of
such a disposition hitherto, they learn of any one who can teach them, and
themselves follow in the same way. And they have the less difficulty in
finding the nature of their own god in themselves, because they have been
compelled to gaze intensely on him; their recollection clings to him, and
they become possessed of him, and receive from him their character and
disposition, so far as man can participate in God. The qualities of their
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