| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Off on a Comet by Jules Verne: accompanied them, and all four having taken their seats,
the conversation was commenced.
Irritated and disgusted at all the cold formalities,
Hector Servadac resolved to leave all the talking to the count;
and he, quite aware that the Englishmen would adhere to the fiction
that they could be supposed to know nothing that had transpired
previous to the introduction felt himself obliged to recapitulate
matters from the very beginning.
"You must be aware, gentlemen," began the count, "that a most
singular catastrophe occurred on the 1st of January last.
Its cause, its limits we have utterly failed to discover,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Golden Sayings of Epictetus by Epictetus: CLXXI
In company avoid frequent and undue talk about your own
actions and dangers. However pleasant it may be to you to enlarge
upon the risks you have run, others may not find such pleasure in
listening to your adventures. Avoid provoking laughter also: it
is a habit from which one easily slides into the ways of the
foolish, and apt to diminish the respect which your neighbors
feel for you. To border on coarse talk is also dangerous. On such
occasions, if a convenient opportunity offer, rebuke the speaker.
If not, at least by relapsing into silence, colouring, and
looking annoyed, show that you are displeased with the subject.
The Golden Sayings of Epictetus |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Essays & Lectures by Oscar Wilde: analysis of the immediate causes and general laws of the phenomena
of life, nor does Thucydides seem to recognise the truth that if
humanity proceeds in circles, the circles are always widening.
Perhaps we may say that with him the philosophy of history is
partly in the metaphysical stage, and see, in the progress of this
idea from Herodotus to Polybius, the exemplification of the Comtian
Law of the three stages of thought, the theological, the
metaphysical, and the scientific: for truly out of the vagueness
of theological mysticism this conception which we call the
Philosophy of History was raised to a scientific principle,
according to which the past was explained and the future predicted
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