| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Daughter of Eve by Honore de Balzac: themselves.
The situation of Madame de Vandenesse can, however, be explained
without recourse to Biblical images. She felt in her soul an enormous
power that was unemployed. Her happiness gave her no suffering; it
rolled along without care or uneasiness; she was not afraid of losing
it; each morning it shone upon her, with the same blue sky, the same
smile, the same sweet words. That clear, still lake was unruffled by
any breeze, even a zephyr; she would fain have seen a ripple on its
glassy surface. Her desire had something so infantine about it that it
ought to be excused; but society is not more indulgent than the God of
Genesis. Madame de Vandenesse, having now become intelligently clever,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Captain Stormfield by Mark Twain: angels are like the militia - never shed the uniform - always
fluttering and floundering around in their wings, butting people
down, flapping here, and there, and everywhere, always imagining
they are attracting the admiring eye - well, they just think they
are the very most important people in heaven. And when you see one
of them come sailing around with one wing tipped up and t'other
down, you make up your mind he is saying to himself: 'I wish Mary
Ann in Arkansaw could see me now. I reckon she'd wish she hadn't
shook me.' No, they're just for show, that's all - only just for
show."
"I judge you've got it about right, Sandy," says I.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring by George Bernard Shaw: self-sacrifice as a panacea. The next generation, especially the
women, wake up at the age of forty or thereabouts to the fact
that their lives have been wasted in the worship of this ideal,
and, what is still more aggravating, that the elders who imposed
it on them did so in a fit of satiety with their own experiments
in the other direction. Then that defrauded generation foams at
the mouth at the very mention of duty, and sets up the
alternative panacea of love, their deprivation of which seems to
them to have been the most cruel and mischievous feature of their
slavery to duty. It is useless to warn them that this reaction,
if prescribed as a panacea, will prove as great a failure as all
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