| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from New Arabian Nights by Robert Louis Stevenson: mankind learn to behave with vigour and decision; and the most
cautious forget their prudence and embrace foolhardy resolutions.
This was one of those occasions for Harry Hartley; and those who
knew him best would have been the most astonished at the lad's
audacity. He stopped dead, flung the bandbox over a garden wall,
and leaping upward with incredible agility and seizing the
copestone with his hands, he tumbled headlong after it into the
garden.
He came to himself a moment afterwards, seated in a border of small
rosebushes. His hands and knees were cut and bleeding, for the
wall had been protected against such an escalade by a liberal
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Complete Angler by Izaak Walton: eaten by wounded men, or by men in fevers, or by women in child-bed.
He spawns but once a year; and is, by physicians, held very nutritive;
yet, by many, to be hard of digestion. They abound more in the river Po,
and in England, says Rondeletius, than other parts: and have in their
brain a stone, which is, in foreign parts, sold by apothecaries, being
there noted to be very medicinable against the stone in the reins. These
be a part of the commendations which some philosophical brains have
bestowed upon the freshwater Perch: yet they commend the Sea-Perch
which is known by having but one fin on his back, of which they say we
English see but a few, to be a much better fish.
The Perch grows slowly, yet will grow, as I have been credibly
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Gorgias by Plato: disgrace, exceeds either in pain or evil--must it not be so?
POLUS: Yes.
SOCRATES: But then again, what was the observation which you just now
made, about doing and suffering wrong? Did you not say, that suffering
wrong was more evil, and doing wrong more disgraceful?
POLUS: I did.
SOCRATES: Then, if doing wrong is more disgraceful than suffering, the
more disgraceful must be more painful and must exceed in pain or in evil or
both: does not that also follow?
POLUS: Of course.
SOCRATES: First, then, let us consider whether the doing of injustice
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