| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Story of an African Farm by Olive Schreiner: him, and his blue eyes gazing out far across the flat, like one who sits on
the seashore watching that which is fading, fading from him.
Against his breast was a letter found in the desk addressed to himself, but
never posted. It held only four words: "You must marry Em." He wore it
in a black bag round his neck. It was the only letter she had ever written
to him.
"You see if the sheep don't have the scab this year!" said Tant Sannie as
she waddled after Em. "It's with all these new inventions that the wrath
of God must fall on us. What were the children of Israel punished for, if
it wasn't for making a golden calf? I may have my sins, but I do remember
the tenth commandment: 'Honour thy father and mother that it may be well
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Laches by Plato: be courageous, are really wiser than mankind; or whether you will have the
boldness, in the face of universal opinion, to deny their courage.
NICIAS: Why, Laches, I do not call animals or any other things which have
no fear of dangers, because they are ignorant of them, courageous, but only
fearless and senseless. Do you imagine that I should call little children
courageous, which fear no dangers because they know none? There is a
difference, to my way of thinking, between fearlessness and courage. I am
of opinion that thoughtful courage is a quality possessed by very few, but
that rashness and boldness, and fearlessness, which has no forethought, are
very common qualities possessed by many men, many women, many children,
many animals. And you, and men in general, call by the term 'courageous'
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson by Mark Twain: He must keep his honor spotless. Those laws were his chart;
his course was marked out on it; if he swerved from it by so much as
half a point of the compass, it meant shipwreck to his honor;
that is to say, degradation from his rank as a gentleman.
These laws required certain things of him which his religion might forbid:
then his religion must yield--the laws could not be relaxed to
accommodate religions or anything else. Honor stood first;
and the laws defined what it was and wherein it differed in certain
details from honor as defined by church creeds and by the social laws
and customs of some of the minor divisions of the globe that had got
crowded out when the sacred boundaries of Virginia were staked out.
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