| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Essays & Lectures by Oscar Wilde: to go back with him to his lecture, which a few of us did, and
there he spoke to us not on art this time but on life, saying that
it seemed to him to be wrong that all the best physique and
strength of the young men in England should be spent aimlessly on
cricket ground or river, without any result at all except that if
one rowed well one got a pewter-pot, and if one made a good score,
a cane-handled bat. He thought, he said, that we should be working
at something that would do good to other people, at something by
which we might show that in all labour there was something noble.
Well, we were a good deal moved, and said we would do anything he
wished. So he went out round Oxford and found two villages, Upper
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Alexandria and her Schools by Charles Kingsley: long--though, alas! it has detained every boy who ever trembled over his
Greek grammar, for many a weary year; and, I cannot help suspecting, has
been the main cause that so many young men who have spent seven years in
learning Greek, know nothing about it at the end of the seven. For I
must say, that as far as we can see, these Alexandrian pedants were
thorough pedants; very polished and learned gentlemen, no doubt, and,
like Callimachus, the pets of princes: but after all, men who thought
that they could make up for not writing great works themselves, by
showing, with careful analysis and commentation, how men used to write
them of old, or rather how they fancied men used to write them; for,
consider, if they had really known how the thing was done, they must
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Faith of Men by Jack London: positively that in a similar capacity he served the Western Union
when it attempted to put through its trans-Alaskan and Siberian
telegraph to Europe. Further, there was Joe Lamson, the whaling
captain, who, when ice-bound off the mouth of the Mackenzie, had
had him come aboard after tobacco. This last touch proves Thomas
Stevens's identity conclusively. His quest for tobacco was
perennial and untiring. Ere we became fairly acquainted, I learned
to greet him with one hand, and pass the pouch with the other. But
the night I met him in John O'Brien's Dawson saloon, his head was
wreathed in a nimbus of fifty-cent cigar smoke, and instead of my
pouch he demanded my sack. We were standing by a faro table, and
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