| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Letters from England by Elizabeth Davis Bancroft: affairs, which I have all my life looked upon from so great a
distance.
LETTER: To Mrs. W.W. Story
LONDON, March 23, 1847
My dear Mrs. Story: I should have thanked you by the last steamer
for your note and the charming volume which accompanied it, but my
thoughts and feelings were so much occupied by the sad tidings I
heard from my own family that I wrote to no one out of it. The
poems, which would at all times have given me great pleasure, gave
me still more here than they would if I were with you on the other
side of the Atlantic. I am not cosmopolitan enough to love any
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from On the Duty of Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau: would not be as an enemy within its walls, they do not know
by how much truth is stronger than error, nor how much more
eloquently and effectively he can combat injustice who has
experienced a little in his own person. Cast your whole
vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence.
A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority;
it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when
it clogs by its whole weight. If the alternative is to keep
all just men in prison, or give up war and slavery, the
State will not hesitate which to choose. If a thousand men
were not to pay their tax bills this year, that would not be
On the Duty of Civil Disobedience |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James: The simplest rudiment of mystical experience would seem to be
that deepened sense of the significance of a maxim or formula
which occasionally sweeps over one. "I've heard that said all my
life," we exclaim, "but I never realized its full meaning until
now." "When a fellow-monk," said Luther, "one day repeated
the words of the Creed: 'I believe in the forgiveness of sins,'
I saw the Scripture in an entirely new light; and straightway I
felt as if I were born anew. It was as if I had found the door
of paradise thrown wide open."[226] This sense of deeper
significance is not confined to rational propositions. Single
words,[227] and conjunctions of words, effects of light on land
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