| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Prince Otto by Robert Louis Stevenson: Doctor Gotthold.
'Your Highness has more memory than your servant,' said the Baron;
and then he, in his turn, carefully perused the fateful paper.
'Good!' said he.
'You will appear in the drawing-room, Baron?' she asked.
'I thought it better,' said he, 'to avoid the possibility of a
public affront. Anything that shook my credit might hamper us in
the immediate future.'
'You are right,' she said; and she held out her hand as to an old
friend and equal.
CHAPTER IX - THE PRICE OF THE RIVER FARM; IN WHICH VAINGLORY GOES
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Lesson of the Master by Henry James: George's exclamation of a few days before.
"Ah yes, for him there are too many - his life's too complicated."
"Have you seen it NEAR? That's what I should like to do; it might
explain some mysteries," her visitor went on. She asked him what
mysteries he meant, and he said: "Oh peculiarities of his work,
inequalities, superficialities. For one who looks at it from the
artistic point of view it contains a bottomless ambiguity."
She became at this, on the spot, all intensity. "Ah do describe
that more - it's so interesting. There are no such suggestive
questions. I'm so fond of them. He thinks he's a failure -
fancy!" she beautifully wailed.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Philebus by Plato: after life are strengthened, or perhaps weakened by the force of public
opinion. They may be corrected and enlarged by experience, they may be
reasoned about, they may be brought home to us by the circumstances of our
lives, they may be intensified by imagination, by reflection, by a course
of action likely to confirm them. Under the influence of religious feeling
or by an effort of thought, any one beginning with the ordinary rules of
morality may create out of them for himself ideals of holiness and virtue.
They slumber in the minds of most men, yet in all of us there remains some
tincture of affection, some desire of good, some sense of truth, some fear
of the law. Of some such state or process each individual is conscious in
himself, and if he compares his own experience with that of others he will
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