| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Outlaw of Torn by Edgar Rice Burroughs: ere another swift move of that master sword hand
placed a fellow to parallel the first.
Five times did the razor point touch the forehead of
Peter of Colfax, until the watchers saw there, upon
the brow of the doomed man, the seal of death, in let-
ters of blood--NT.
It was the end. Peter of Colfax, cut to ribbons yet
fighting like the maniac he had become, was as good
as dead, for the mark of the Outlaw of Torn was
upon his brow. Now, shrieking and gibbering through
his frothy lips, his yellow fangs bared in a mad and
The Outlaw of Torn |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Republic by Plato: in helpless misery, is the reverse of that other portrait of perfect
injustice ruling in happiness and splendour, which first of all
Thrasymachus, and afterwards the sons of Ariston had drawn, and is also the
reverse of the king whose rule of life is the good of his subjects.
Each of these governments and individuals has a corresponding ethical
gradation: the ideal State is under the rule of reason, not extinguishing
but harmonizing the passions, and training them in virtue; in the timocracy
and the timocratic man the constitution, whether of the State or of the
individual, is based, first, upon courage, and secondly, upon the love of
honour; this latter virtue, which is hardly to be esteemed a virtue, has
superseded all the rest. In the second stage of decline the virtues have
The Republic |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan by Honore de Balzac: punished, like that master, for having pleased it too well. For
eighteen years the idol of the faubourg Saint-Germain, he had, like
other heirs of great families led a dissipated life, spent solely on
pleasure. His father, ruined by the revolution, had somewhat recovered
his position on the return of the Bourbons, as governor of a royal
domain, with salary and perquisites; but this uncertain fortune the
old prince spent, as it came, in keeping up the traditions of a great
seigneur before the revolution; so that when the law of indemnity was
passed, the sums he received were all swallowed up in the luxury he
displayed in his vast hotel.
The old prince died some little time before the revolution of July
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