| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Alexander's Bridge by Willa Cather: His shoulders were sunk deep in the cushions
and one hand hung large and passive over the
arm of his chair. He had slipped on a purple
velvet smoking-coat. His wife, Wilson surmised,
had chosen it. She was clearly very proud
of his good looks and his fine color.
But, with the glow of an immediate interest
gone out of it, the engineer's face looked
tired, even a little haggard. The three lines
in his forehead, directly above the nose, deepened
as he sat thinking, and his powerful head
Alexander's Bridge |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Prince by Nicolo Machiavelli: through the good advisers that he has around him, beyond doubt they
are deceived, because this is an axiom which never fails: that a
prince who is not wise himself will never take good advice, unless by
chance he has yielded his affairs entirely to one person who happens
to be a very prudent man. In this case indeed he may be well governed,
but it would not be for long, because such a governor would in a short
time take away his state from him.
But if a prince who is not inexperienced should take counsel from more
than one he will never get united counsels, nor will he know how to
unite them. Each of the counsellors will think of his own interests,
and the prince will not know how to control them or to see through
The Prince |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Common Sense by Thomas Paine: by the following position, viz.
Should affairs he patched up with Britain, and she to remain the governing
and sovereign power of America, (which, as matters are now circumstanced,
is giving up the point entirely) we shall deprive ourselves of the very means
of sinking the debt we have, or may contract. The value of the back lands
which some of the provinces are clandestinely deprived of, by the unjust
extension of the limits of Canada, valued only at five pounds sterling
per hundred acres, amount to upwards of twenty-five millions,
Pennsylvania currency; and the quit-rents at one penny sterling per acre,
to two millions yearly.
It is by the sale of those lands that the debt may be sunk,
Common Sense |
