| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Republic by Plato: required by his courage and strength, and command of money and friends.
And at his side let us place the just man in his nobleness and simplicity,
wishing, as Aeschylus says, to be and not to seem good. There must be no
seeming, for if he seem to be just he will be honoured and rewarded, and
then we shall not know whether he is just for the sake of justice or for
the sake of honours and rewards; therefore, let him be clothed in justice
only, and have no other covering; and he must be imagined in a state of
life the opposite of the former. Let him be the best of men, and let him
be thought the worst; then he will have been put to the proof; and we shall
see whether he will be affected by the fear of infamy and its consequences.
And let him continue thus to the hour of death; being just and seeming to
The Republic |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Ball at Sceaux by Honore de Balzac: under pretence of admiring the views from the garden. Her brother lent
himself with malicious good-humor to the divagations of her rather
eccentric wanderings. Emilie then saw the attractive couple get into
an elegant tilbury, by which stood a mounted groom in livery. At the
moment when, from his high seat, the young man was drawing the reins
even, she caught a glance from his eye such as a man casts aimlessly
at the crowd; and then she enjoyed the feeble satisfaction of seeing
him turn his head to look at her. The young lady did the same. Was it
from jealousy?
"I imagine you have now seen enough of the garden," said her brother.
"We may go back to the dancing."
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from An Unsocial Socialist by George Bernard Shaw: CHAPTER VII
Agatha was at this time in her seventeenth year. She had a lively
perception of the foibles of others, and no reverence for her
seniors, whom she thought dull, cautious, and ridiculously
amenable by commonplaces. But she was subject to the illusion
which disables youth in spite of its superiority to age. She
thought herself an exception. Crediting Mr. Jansenius and the
general mob of mankind with nothing but a grovelling
consciousness of some few material facts, she felt in herself an
exquisite sense and all-embracing conception of nature, shared
only by her favorite poets and heroes of romance and history.
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