| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin: of food, for it allows them rapidly to increase in number. But the real
importance of a large number of eggs or seeds is to make up for much
destruction at some period of life; and this period in the great majority
of cases is an early one. If an animal can in any way protect its own eggs
or young, a small number may be produced, and yet the average stock be
fully kept up; but if many eggs or young are destroyed, many must be
produced, or the species will become extinct. It would suffice to keep up
the full number of a tree, which lived on an average for a thousand years,
if a single seed were produced once in a thousand years, supposing that
this seed were never destroyed, and could be ensured to germinate in a
fitting place. So that in all cases, the average number of any animal or
On the Origin of Species |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Gettysburg Address by Abraham Lincoln: upon this continent a new nation: conceived in liberty, and
dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war. . .testing whether
that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated. . .
can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war.
We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place
for those who here gave their lives that this nation might live.
It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate. . .we cannot consecrate. . .
we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead,
who struggled here have consecrated it, far above our poor power
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Captain Stormfield by Mark Twain: Talmage, who is laying up a considerable disappointment for
himself. He says, every now and then in his sermons, that the
first thing he does when he gets to heaven, will be to fling his
arms around Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and kiss them and weep on
them. There's millions of people down there on earth that are
promising themselves the same thing. As many as sixty thousand
people arrive here every single day, that want to run straight to
Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and hug them and weep on them. Now mind
you, sixty thousand a day is a pretty heavy contract for those old
people. If they were a mind to allow it, they wouldn't ever have
anything to do, year in and year out, but stand up and be hugged
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