| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Republic by Plato: language.
No doubt, he said.
There is something ridiculous in the expression 'master of himself;' for
the master is also the servant and the servant the master; and in all these
modes of speaking the same person is denoted.
Certainly.
The meaning is, I believe, that in the human soul there is a better and
also a worse principle; and when the better has the worse under control,
then a man is said to be master of himself; and this is a term of praise:
but when, owing to evil education or association, the better principle,
which is also the smaller, is overwhelmed by the greater mass of the worse
The Republic |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Iron Puddler by James J. Davis: playthings of blind forces that crush them, and there is no
answer to the riddle. This is nonsense. I admit that we are in
the grip of blind forces. But we are not blind. We can not change
those forces. If we fight against them they will crush us. But by
going with them, guiding our careers along their courses, they
will bear us to the port we're steering for.
The mob spirit in man is one of those blind forces that so
often lead to shipwreck. The mob-mind differs from the mind of
reason. To tell them apart is like distinguishing mushrooms from
toadstools. They look alike, but one means health and the other
is poison. Life has taught me the difference between a movement
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Golden Threshold by Sarojini Naidu: You know how high my ideal of Art is; and to me my poor casual
little poems seem to be less than beautiful--I mean with that
final enduring beauty that I desire." And, in another letter,
she writes: "I am not a poet really. I have the vision and the
desire, but not the voice. If I could write just one poem full
of beauty and the spirit of greatness, I should be exultantly
silent for ever; but I sing just as the birds do, and my songs
are as ephemeral." It is for this bird-like quality of song, it
seems to me, that they are to be valued. They hint, in a sort of
delicately evasive way, at a rare temperament, the temperament of
a woman of the East, finding expression through a Western
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