| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Poems of Goethe, Bowring, Tr. by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Her girdle was a golden band,
A wreath of corn was on her head,
Her eye the day's bright lustre shed;
Her name is honest Industry,
Else, Justice, Magnanimity.
She enter'd with a kindly greeting;
He felt no wonder at the meeting,
For, kind and fair as she might be,
He long had known her, fancied he.
"I have selected thee," she said,
"From all who earth's wild mazes tread,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Father Sergius by Leo Tolstoy: who wrote that Sergius's pride was the cause of all that had
happened. The old man pointed out that his fits of anger were
due to the fact that in refusing all clerical honours he
humiliated himself not for the sake of God but for the sake of
his pride. 'There now, am I not a splendid man not to want
anything?' That was why he could not tolerate the Abbot's
action. 'I have renounced everything for the glory of God, and
here I am exhibited like a wild beast!' 'Had you renounced
vanity for God's sake you would have borne it. Worldly pride is
not yet dead in you. I have thought about you, Sergius my son,
and prayed also, and this is what God has suggested to me. At
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Alkahest by Honore de Balzac: all day. But--unexpected shock!--Madame Claes learned through the
humiliating medium of some women friends, who showed surprise at her
ignorance, that her husband constantly imported instruments of
physical science, valuable materials, books, machinery, etc., from
Paris, and was on the highroad to ruin in search of the Philosopher's
Stone. She ought, so her kind friends added, to think of her children,
and her own future; it was criminal not to use her influence to draw
Monsieur Claes from the fatal path on which he had entered.
Though Madame Claes, with the tone and manner of a great lady,
silenced these absurd speeches, she was inwardly terrified in spite of
her apparent confidence, and she resolved to break through her present
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