| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Gettysburg Address by Abraham Lincoln: can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war.
We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place
for those who here gave their lives that this nation might live.
It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate. . .we cannot consecrate. . .
we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead,
who struggled here have consecrated it, far above our poor power
to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember,
what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.
It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished
work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Pathology of Lying, Etc. by William and Mary Healy: instances of the type represented by Case 12, where the
individual by the virtue of language ability endeavors to
maintain a place in the world which his abilities do not
otherwise justify, and where the very contradiction between
abilities and disabilities leads to the development of an
excessive habit of lying, are known in considerable number by us.
Many of these mentally defective verbalists do not even grade
high enough to come in our border-line cases, and yet frequently,
by virtue of their gift of language, the world in general
considers them fairly normal. They are really on a constant
social strain by virtue of this, and while they are not purely
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Purse by Honore de Balzac: highest virtue, as to decide whether Adelaide's mother was an old
coquette accustomed to weigh, to calculate, to sell everything,
or a loving woman, full of noble feeling and amiable qualities.
But at Schinner's age the first impulse of the heart is to
believe in goodness. And indeed, as he studied Adelaide's noble
and almost haughty brow, as he looked into her eyes full of soul
and thought, he breathed, so to speak, the sweet and modest
fragrance of virtue. In the course of the conversation he seized
an opportunity of discussing portraits in general, to give
himself a pretext for examining the frightful pastel, of which
the color had flown, and the chalk in many places fallen away.
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