| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Democracy In America, Volume 2 by Alexis de Toqueville: despise it even whilst they yield to its influence; whereas they
have a natural esteem and secret admiration for the immaterial
part of man, even though they sometimes refuse to submit to its
dominion. That is enough to give a lofty cast to their opinions
and their tastes, and to bid them tend with no interested motive,
and as it were by impulse, to pure feelings and elevated
thoughts.
It is not certain that Socrates and his followers had very
fixed opinions as to what would befall man hereafter; but the
sole point of belief on which they were determined - that the
soul has nothing in common with the body, and survives it - was
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from When the World Shook by H. Rider Haggard: poor benighted man had never heard. I pointed out especially that
unless he repented, his life, by all accounts, had been so
wicked, that he was certainly destined to the latter place."
"What did he say to that?" I asked.
"Do you know, I think it frightened him, if one could imagine
Oro being frightened. At any rate he remarked that the truth or
falsity of what I said was an urgent matter for him, as he could
not expect to live more than a few hundred years longer, though
perhaps he might prolong the period by another spell of sleep.
Then he asked me why I thought him so wicked. I replied because
he himself said that he had drowned millions of people, which
When the World Shook |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Deserted Woman by Honore de Balzac: to allay her suspicions. /A letter!/ For a woman with the most
exquisite feminine perception, as well as the intuition of passionate
love, a letter in itself was a sentence of death.
So when Jacques came and brought Mme. de Beauseant a sheet of paper
folded in a triangle, she trembled, poor woman, like a snared swallow.
A mysterious sensation of physical cold spread from head to foot,
wrapping her about in an icy winding sheet. If he did not rush to her
feet, if he did not come to her in tears, and pale, and like a lover,
she knew that all was lost. And yet, so many hopes are there in the
heart of a woman who loves, that she is only slain by stab after stab,
and loves on till the last drop of life-blood drains away.
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