| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Walden by Henry David Thoreau: is a dawn in me. Moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep.
Why is it that men give so poor an account of their day if they have
not been slumbering? They are not such poor calculators. If they
had not been overcome with drowsiness, they would have performed
something. The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but
only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual
exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life.
To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was
quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?
We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by
mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which
Walden |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Tramp Abroad by Mark Twain: and with no comfort but what we could get out of the fact
that the peasants at work away up on the steep mountainsides
above our heads were even worse off than we were.
By and by it became impossible to endure the intolerable
glare and heat any longer; so we struck across the ravine
and entered the deep cool twilight of the forest, to hunt
for what the guide-book called the "old road."
We found an old road, and it proved eventually to be the
right one, though we followed it at the time with the conviction
that it was the wrong one. If it was the wrong one there
could be no use in hurrying; therefore we did not hurry,
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx: case of ancient property, what you admit in the case of feudal
property, you are of course forbidden to admit in the case of
your own bourgeois form of property.
Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this
infamous proposal of the Communists.
On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family,
based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed
form this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this
state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of
the family among the proletarians, and in public prostitution.
The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its
The Communist Manifesto |
