| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Gorgias by Plato: CALLICLES: What! did you never hear that Themistocles was a good man, and
Cimon and Miltiades and Pericles, who is just lately dead, and whom you
heard yourself?
SOCRATES: Yes, Callicles, they were good men, if, as you said at first,
true virtue consists only in the satisfaction of our own desires and those
of others; but if not, and if, as we were afterwards compelled to
acknowledge, the satisfaction of some desires makes us better, and of
others, worse, and we ought to gratify the one and not the other, and there
is an art in distinguishing them,--can you tell me of any of these
statesmen who did distinguish them?
CALLICLES: No, indeed, I cannot.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Divine Comedy (translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow) by Dante Alighieri: So low he fell, that all appliances
For his salvation were already short,
Save showing him the people of perdition.
For this I visited the gates of death,
And unto him, who so far up has led him,
My intercessions were with weeping borne.
God's lofty fiat would be violated,
If Lethe should be passed, and if such viands
Should tasted be, withouten any scot
Of penitence, that gushes forth in tears."
Purgatorio: Canto XXXI
The Divine Comedy (translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow) |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Warlord of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs: greater debt of gratitude than to John Carter, Prince of Helium.
"Years ago, Kulan Tith," he continued, "upon the occasion of
your last visit to me, you were greatly taken with the charms and
graces of my only daughter, Thuvia. You saw how I adored her, and
later you learned that, inspired by some unfathomable whim, she had
taken the last, long, voluntary pilgrimage upon the cold bosom of
the mysterious Iss, leaving me desolate.
"Some months ago I first heard of the expedition which John Carter had
led against Issus and the Holy Therns. Faint rumors of the atrocities
The Warlord of Mars |
