| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Rape of Lucrece by William Shakespeare: Then kings' misdeeds cannot be hid in clay.
'This deed will make thee only lov'd for fear,
But happy monarchs still are fear'd for love:
With foul offenders thou perforce must bear,
When they in thee the like offences prove:
If but for fear of this, thy will remove;
For princes are the glass, the school, the book,
Where subjects eyes do learn, do read, do look.
'And wilt thou be the school where Lust shall learn?
Must he in thee read lectures of such shame:
Wilt thou be glass, wherein it shall discern
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Euthydemus by Plato: And if you were ill, whom would you rather have as a companion in a
dangerous illness--a wise physician, or an ignorant one?
A wise one.
You think, I said, that to act with a wise man is more fortunate than to
act with an ignorant one?
He assented.
Then wisdom always makes men fortunate: for by wisdom no man would ever
err, and therefore he must act rightly and succeed, or his wisdom would be
wisdom no longer.
We contrived at last, somehow or other, to agree in a general conclusion,
that he who had wisdom had no need of fortune. I then recalled to his mind
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Works of Samuel Johnson by Samuel Johnson: on an unknown and desolate country, with the hope
that their miseries will be at some distant time
recounted with delight. There are few higher
gratifications, than that of reflection on surmounted evils,
when they are not incurred nor protracted by our
fault, and neither approach us with cowardice nor
guilt.
But this felicity is almost always abated by the
reflection that they with whom we should be most
pleased to share it are now in the grave. A few years
make such havock in human generations, that we
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