| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Soul of Man by Oscar Wilde: individual is to make what is beautiful. And as I have mentioned
the word labour, I cannot help saying that a great deal of nonsense
is being written and talked nowadays about the dignity of manual
labour. There is nothing necessarily dignified about manual labour
at all, and most of it is absolutely degrading. It is mentally and
morally injurious to man to do anything in which he does not find
pleasure, and many forms of labour are quite pleasureless
activities, and should be regarded as such. To sweep a slushy
crossing for eight hours, on a day when the east wind is blowing is
a disgusting occupation. To sweep it with mental, moral, or
physical dignity seems to me to be impossible. To sweep it with
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Fables by Robert Louis Stevenson: So the man rose and put forth his boat at the time of the
sunsetting; and the Poor Thing sat in the prow, and the spray blew
through his bones like snow, and the wind whistled in his teeth,
and the boat dipped not with the weight of him.
"I am fearful to see you, my son," said the man. " For methinks
you are no thing of God."
"It is only the wind that whistles in my teeth," said the Poor
Thing, "and there is no life in me to keep it out."
So they came to the little isle of sheep, where the surf burst all
about it in the midst of the sea, and it was all green with
bracken, and all wet with dew, and the moon enlightened it. They
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain: RECEPTION OF CAPTAIN BASIL HALL'S BOOK IN THE UNITED STATES
HAVING now arrived nearly at the end of our travels,
I am induced, ere I conclude, again to mention what I consider
as one of the most remarkable traits in the national character
of the Americans; namely, their exquisite sensitiveness and
soreness respecting everything said or written concerning them.
Of this, perhaps, the most remarkable example I can give is
the effect produced on nearly every class of readers by the
appearance of Captain Basil Hall's 'Travels in North America.'
In fact, it was a sort of moral earthquake, and the vibration it
occasioned through the nerves of the republic, from one corner
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