| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Meno by Plato: country?
MENO: What have they to do with the question?
SOCRATES: Because they require to be fastened in order to keep them, and
if they are not fastened they will play truant and run away.
MENO: Well, what of that?
SOCRATES: I mean to say that they are not very valuable possessions if
they are at liberty, for they will walk off like runaway slaves; but when
fastened, they are of great value, for they are really beautiful works of
art. Now this is an illustration of the nature of true opinions: while
they abide with us they are beautiful and fruitful, but they run away out
of the human soul, and do not remain long, and therefore they are not of
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Plutarch's Lives by A. H. Clough: observing the enmity betwixt Pompey and Crassus, and finding
that by joining with one he should make the other his enemy, he
endeavored by all means to reconcile them, an object in itself
honorable and tending to the public good, but as he undertook
it, a mischievous and subtle intrigue. For he well knew that
opposite parties or factions in a commonwealth, like passengers
in a boat, serve to trim and balance the unready motions of
power there; whereas if they combine and come all over to one
side, they cause a shock which will be sure to overset the
vessel and carry down everything. And therefore Cato wisely
told those who charged all the calamities of Rome upon the
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Exiles by Honore de Balzac: As he gazed at the spectacle, the stranger's eyes moistened with the
tenderest of human tears: Godefroid too was weeping; his trembling
hand touched that of the elder man, who, looking round, confessed his
emotion. But thinking his dignity as a man compromised, no doubt, to
redeem it, he said in a deep voice:
"I weep for my native land. I am an exile! Young man, in such an hour
as this I left my home. There, at this hour, the fireflies are coming
out of their fragile dwellings and clinging like diamond sparks to the
leaves of the iris. At this hour the breeze, as sweet as the sweetest
poetry, rises up from a valley bathed in light, bearing on its wings
the richest fragrance. On the horizon I could see a golden city like
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