| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Euthyphro by Plato: suffering?
EUTHYPHRO: Yes.
SOCRATES: And the same holds as in the previous instances; the state of
being loved follows the act of being loved, and not the act the state.
EUTHYPHRO: Certainly.
SOCRATES: And what do you say of piety, Euthyphro: is not piety,
according to your definition, loved by all the gods?
EUTHYPHRO: Yes.
SOCRATES: Because it is pious or holy, or for some other reason?
EUTHYPHRO: No, that is the reason.
SOCRATES: It is loved because it is holy, not holy because it is loved?
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from When the Sleeper Wakes by H. G. Wells: "Ostrog has discipline--he has plans. Do you
know, out there just now I felt--. When I heard that
these aeroplanes were a stage nearer. I felt as if I
were fighting the machinery of fate."
She made no answer for a while. "We have done
right," she said at last.
He looked at her doubtfully. "We have done what
we could. But does this depend upon us? Is it not
an older sin, a wider sin?"
"What do you mean? " she asked.
"These blacks are savages, ruled by force, used as
When the Sleeper Wakes |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Prince Otto by Robert Louis Stevenson: little, stout, old gentleman, opening a door behind Gotthold,
received them fairly in the face. With his parrot's beak for a
nose, his pursed mouth, his little goggling eyes, he was the picture
of formality; and in ordinary circumstances, strutting behind the
drum of his corporation, he impressed the beholder with a certain
air of frozen dignity and wisdom. But at the smallest contrariety,
his trembling hands and disconnected gestures betrayed the weakness
at the root. And now, when he was thus surprisingly received in
that library of Mittwalden Palace, which was the customary haunt of
silence, his hands went up into the air as if he had been shot, and
he cried aloud with the scream of an old woman.
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