| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Psychology of Revolution by Gustave le Bon: important of all--that which for more than twenty years
overwhelmed all Europe, and whose echoes are still to be heard.
The French Revolution is an inexhaustible mine of psychological
documents. No period of the life of humanity has presented such
a mass of experience, accumulated in so short a time.
On each page of this great drama we have found numerous
applications of the principles expounded in my various works,
concerning the transitory mentality of crowds and the permanent
soul of the peoples, the action of beliefs, the influence of
mystic, affective, and collective elements, and the conflict
between the various forms of logic.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Montezuma's Daughter by H. Rider Haggard: faith or in any other.'
And then, looking on that dead babe, I wept also. Every hour in
those terrible months it was my lot to see a thousand sights more
awful, and yet this sight of a dead infant moved me the most of all
of them. The child was mine, my firstborn, its mother wept beside
me, and its stiff and tiny fingers seemed to drag at my heart
strings. Seek not the cause, for the Almighty Who gave the heart
its infinite power of pain alone can answer, and to our ears He is
dumb.
Then I took a mattock and dug a hole outside the house till I came
to water, which in Tenoctitlan is found at a depth of two feet or
Montezuma's Daughter |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Prince of Bohemia by Honore de Balzac: at carnival time, when their exuberant wit, repressed for the rest of
the year, finds a vent in more or less ingenious buffoonery.
"What times we live in! What an irrational central power which allows
such tremendous energies to run to waste! There are diplomatists in
Bohemia quite capable of overturning Russia's designs, if they but
felt the power of France at their backs. There are writers,
administrators, soldiers, and artists in Bohemia; every faculty, every
kind of brain is represented there. Bohemia is a microcosm. If the
Czar would buy Bohemia for a score of millions and set its population
down in Odessa--always supposing that they consented to leave the
asphalt of the boulevards--Odessa would be Paris with the year. In
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