| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Personal Record by Joseph Conrad: keep good hold on the one thing really mine, but the fact is that
I have a positive horror of losing even for one moving moment
that full possession of my self which is the first condition of
good service. And I have carried my notion of good service from
my earlier into my later existence. I, who have never sought in
the written word anything else but a form of the Beautiful--I
have carried over that article of creed from the decks of ships
to the more circumscribed space of my desk, and by that act, I
suppose, I have become permanently imperfect in the eyes of the
ineffable company of pure esthetes.
As in political so in literary action a man wins friends for
A Personal Record |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce: This man is dumb."
Ariel Selp
INJURY, n. An offense next in degree of enormity to a slight.
INJUSTICE, n. A burden which of all those that we load upon others
and carry ourselves is lightest in the hands and heaviest upon the
back.
INK, n. A villainous compound of tannogallate of iron, gum-arabic and
water, chiefly used to facilitate the infection of idiocy and promote
intellectual crime. The properties of ink are peculiar and
contradictory: it may be used to make reputations and unmake them; to
The Devil's Dictionary |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Second Inaugural Address by Abraham Lincoln: Both parties deprecated war; but one of them would make war rather
than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather
than let it perish. And the war came.
One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed
generally over the Union, but localized in the Southern part of it.
These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew
that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war. To strengthen,
perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the
insurgents would rend the Union, even by war; while the government claimed
no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it.
Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration
Second Inaugural Address |
