| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The School For Scandal by Richard Brinsley Sheridan: Teazle have not agreed lately so well as could be wish'd.
MARIA. 'Tis strangely impertinent for people to busy themselves so.
MRS. CANDOUR. Very true, Child; but what's to be done? People will
talk--there's no preventing it.--why it was but yesterday I was told
that Miss Gadabout had eloped with Sir Filagree Flirt. But, Lord!
there is no minding what one hears; tho' to be sure I had this from
very good authority.
MARIA. Such reports are highly scandalous.
MRS. CANDOUR. So they are Child--shameful! shameful! but the world
is so censorious no character escapes. Lord, now! who would have
suspected your friend, Miss Prim, of an indiscretion Yet such is the
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin by Robert Louis Stevenson: the bed we sleep upon. This with no touch of the motive-monger or
the ascetic. He loved his virtues to be practical, his heroes to
be great eaters of beef; he loved the jovial Heracles, loved the
astute Odysseus; not the Robespierres and Wesleys. A fine buoyant
sense of life and of man's unequal character ran through all his
thoughts. He could not tolerate the spirit of the pick-thank;
being what we are, he wished us to see others with a generous eye
of admiration, not with the smallness of the seeker after faults.
If there shone anywhere a virtue, no matter how incongruously set,
it was upon the virtue we must fix our eyes. I remember having
found much entertainment in Voltaire's SAUL, and telling him what
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Boys' Life of Abraham Lincoln by Helen Nicolay: becoming dignity in all official or public ceremonies. He
received the diplomats sent to Washington from the courts of
Europe with a formal and quiet reserve which made them realize at
once that although this son of the people had been born in a log
cabin, he was ruler of a great nation, and more than that, was a
prince by right of his own fine instincts and good breeding.
He was ever gentle and courteous, but with a few quiet words he
could silence a bore who had come meaning to talk to him for
hours. For his friends he had always a ready smile and a quaintly
turned phrase. His sense of humor was his salvation. Without it
he must have died of the strain and anxiety of the Civil War.
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