| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Golden Sayings of Epictetus by Epictetus: free, he sees that the things which surround him are of two
kinds. Some are free from hindrance and in the power of the will.
Other are subject to hindrance, and depend on the will of other
men. If then he place his own good, his own best interest, only
in that which is free from hindrance and in his power, he will be
free, tranquil, happy, unharmed, noble-hearted, and pious; giving
thanks to all things unto God, finding fault with nothing that
comes to pass, laying no charge against anything. Whereas if he
place his good in outward things, depending not on the will, he
must perforce be subject to hindrance and restraint, the slave of
those that have power over the things he desires and fears; he
The Golden Sayings of Epictetus |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Arrow of Gold by Joseph Conrad: should still keep on going like this reaching for more and more. I
suppose he must have been sipping a good deal of wine while we
talked and all at once he let out an atrocity which was too much
for me. He had been moaning and sentimentalizing but then suddenly
he showed me his fangs. 'No,' he cries, 'you can't imagine what a
satisfaction it is to feel all that penniless, beggarly lot of the
dear, honest, meritorious poor wriggling and slobbering under one's
boots.' You may tell me that he is a contemptible animal anyhow,
but you should have heard the tone! I felt my bare arms go cold
like ice. A moment before I had been hot and faint with sheer
boredom. I jumped up from the table, rang for Rose, and told her
The Arrow of Gold |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals by Charles Darwin: of the other catching him by the tail; but as far as I can
find out, dogs very rarely catch each other in this manner.
I asked a gentleman, who had kept foxhounds all his life,
and be applied to other experienced sportsmen, whether they
had ever seen hounds thus seize a fox; but they never had.
It appears that when a dog is chased, or when in danger
of being struck behind, or of anything falling on him, in all
these cases he wishes to withdraw as quickly as possible his
whole hind-quarters, and that from some sympathy or connection
between the muscles, the tail is then drawn closely inwards.
A similarly connected movement between the hind- quarters and
Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals |
