| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Phaedrus by Plato: PHAEDRUS: Only go on and you may do anything else which you please.
SOCRATES: Come, O ye Muses, melodious, as ye are called, whether you have
received this name from the character of your strains, or because the
Melians are a musical race, help, O help me in the tale which my good
friend here desires me to rehearse, in order that his friend whom he always
deemed wise may seem to him to be wiser than ever.
Once upon a time there was a fair boy, or, more properly speaking, a youth;
he was very fair and had a great many lovers; and there was one special
cunning one, who had persuaded the youth that he did not love him, but he
really loved him all the same; and one day when he was paying his addresses
to him, he used this very argument--that he ought to accept the non-lover
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu by Sax Rohmer: Despite the girl's assurance, we knew that proximity
to the sinister Chinaman must be fraught with danger.
We stood, not in the lion's den, but in the serpent's lair.
From the time when Nayland Smith had come from Burma in pursuit
of this advance-guard of a cogent Yellow Peril, the face of
Dr. Fu-Manchu rarely had been absent from my dreams day or night.
The millions might sleep in peace--the millions in whose
cause we labored!--but we who knew the reality of the danger
knew that a veritable octopus had fastened upon England--
a yellow octopus whose head was that of Dr. Fu-Manchu,
whose tentacles were dacoity, thuggee, modes of death,
 The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from De Profundis by Oscar Wilde: I shall have to teach myself is not to be ashamed of it. I must
accept it as a punishment, and if one is ashamed of having been
punished, one might just as well never have been punished at all.
Of course there are many things of which I was convicted that I had
not done, but then there are many things of which I was convicted
that I had done, and a still greater number of things in my life
for which I was never indicted at all. And as the gods are
strange, and punish us for what is good and humane in us as much as
for what is evil and perverse, I must accept the fact that one is
punished for the good as well as for the evil that one does. I
have no doubt that it is quite right one should be. It helps one,
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