| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Lay Morals by Robert Louis Stevenson: sought it.
Moreover, she, upon her side, was conscious of one point of
superiority. Beside this rather dismal, rather effeminate
man, who recoiled from a worm, who grew giddy on the castle
wall, who bore so helplessly the weight of his misfortunes,
she felt herself a head and shoulders taller in cheerful and
sterling courage. She could walk head in air along the most
precarious rafter; her hand feared neither the grossness nor
the harshness of life's web, but was thrust cheerfully, if
need were, into the briar bush, and could take hold of any
crawling horror. Ruin was mining the walls of her cottage,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from De Profundis by Oscar Wilde: felt that life was changeful, fluid, active, and that to allow it
to be stereotyped into any form was death. He saw that people
should not be too serious over material, common interests: that to
be unpractical was to be a great thing: that one should not bother
too much over affairs. The birds didn't, why should man? He is
charming when he says, 'Take no thought for the morrow; is not the
soul more than meat? is not the body more than raiment?' A Greek
might have used the latter phrase. It is full of Greek feeling.
But only Christ could have said both, and so summed up life
perfectly for us.
His morality is all sympathy, just what morality should be. If the
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Timaeus by Plato: have been brought up; while that which is beyond the range of a man's
education he finds hard to carry out in action, and still harder adequately
to represent in language. I am aware that the Sophists have plenty of
brave words and fair conceits, but I am afraid that being only wanderers
from one city to another, and having never had habitations of their own,
they may fail in their conception of philosophers and statesmen, and may
not know what they do and say in time of war, when they are fighting or
holding parley with their enemies. And thus people of your class are the
only ones remaining who are fitted by nature and education to take part at
once both in politics and philosophy. Here is Timaeus, of Locris in Italy,
a city which has admirable laws, and who is himself in wealth and rank the
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