| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Ten Years Later by Alexandre Dumas: "Nothing more so."
"It was after that, then, that you went to the Comte de la
Fere's?"
"Yes."
"Afterwards to me?"
"Yes."
"And then Porthos?"
"Yes."
"Was it in order to pay us a simple visit?"
"No, I did not know you were engaged, and I wished to take
you with me into England."
Ten Years Later |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Gorgias by Plato: ourselves? And we call to our aid the rhetoric of prayer and preaching,
which the mind silently employs while the struggle between the better and
the worse is going on within us. And sometimes we are too hard upon
ourselves, because we want to restore the balance which self-love has
overthrown or disturbed; and then again we may hear a voice as of a parent
consoling us. In religious diaries a sort of drama is often enacted by the
consciences of men 'accusing or else excusing them.' For all our life long
we are talking with ourselves:--What is thought but speech? What is
feeling but rhetoric? And if rhetoric is used on one side only we shall be
always in danger of being deceived. And so the words of Socrates, which at
first sounded paradoxical, come home to the experience of all of us.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Atheist's Mass by Honore de Balzac: time and his night hours. Horace, in short, was one of those
friends who are never anxious as to what they may get in return
for what they give, feeling sure that they will in their turn get
more than they give. Most of his friends felt for him that
deeply-seated respect which is inspired by unostentatious virtue,
and many of them dreaded his censure. But Horace made no pedantic
display of his qualities. He was neither a puritan nor a
preacher; he could swear with a grace as he gave his advice, and
was always ready for a jollification when occasion offered. A
jolly companion, not more prudish than a trooper, as frank and
outspoken--not as a sailor, for nowadays sailors are wily
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