The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Cousin Betty by Honore de Balzac: and looking at Madame Hulot. "You will not meet with such an old man,
or such a young lover," he said after a pause, "because you love your
daughter too well to hand her over to the manoeuvres of an old
libertine, and because you--the Baronne Hulot, sister of the old
Lieutenant-General who commanded the veteran Grenadiers of the Old
Guard--will not condescend to take a man of spirit wherever you may
find him; for he might be a mere craftsman, as many a millionaire of
to-day was ten years ago, a working artisan, or the foreman of a
factory.
"And then, when you see the girl, urged by her twenty years, capable
of dishonoring you all, you will say to yourself, 'It will be better
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Timaeus by Plato: constructed the heaven he created them also. They are all parts of time,
and the past and future are created species of time, which we unconsciously
but wrongly transfer to the eternal essence; for we say that he 'was,' he
'is,' he 'will be,' but the truth is that 'is' alone is properly attributed
to him, and that 'was' and 'will be' are only to be spoken of becoming in
time, for they are motions, but that which is immovably the same cannot
become older or younger by time, nor ever did or has become, or hereafter
will be, older or younger, nor is subject at all to any of those states
which affect moving and sensible things and of which generation is the
cause. These are the forms of time, which imitates eternity and revolves
according to a law of number. Moreover, when we say that what has become
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Edition of The Ambassadors by Henry James: seated with her in the small salon de lecture that had, for the
most part, in all the weeks, witnessed the wane of his early
vivacity of discussion with Waymarsh. It was an immense thing,
quite a tremendous thing, for her to have come: this truth opened
out to him in spite of his having already arrived for himself at a
fairly vivid view of it. He had done exactly what he had given
Waymarsh his word for--had walked and re-walked the court while he
awaited her advent; acquiring in this exercise an amount of light
that affected him at the time as flooding the scene. She had
decided upon the step in order to give him the benefit of a doubt,
in order to be able to say to her mother that she had, even to
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