| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Duchesse de Langeais by Honore de Balzac: concerning the General put that warrior in so formidable a light,
that the more adroit quietly dropped their pretensions to the
Duchess, and remained in her train merely to turn the position to
account, and to use her name and personality to make better terms
for themselves with certain stars of the second magnitude. And
those lesser powers were delighted to take a lover away from Mme
de Langeais. The Duchess was keen-sighted enough to see these
desertions and treaties with the enemy; and her pride would not
suffer her to be the dupe of them. As M. de Talleyrand, one of
her great admirers, said, she knew how to take a second edition
of revenge, laying the two-edged blade of a sarcasm between the
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin: These scenes of the tropics are in themselves so delicious,
that they almost equal those dearer ones at home, to which
we are bound by each best feeling of the mind.
The next day I employed myself in examining the very
interesting, yet simple structure and origin of these islands.
The water being unusually smooth, I waded over the outer
flat of dead rock as far as the living mounds of coral, on
which the swell of the open sea breaks. In some of the
gullies and hollows there were beautiful green and other
coloured fishes, and the form and tints of many of the zoophytes
were admirable. It is excusable to grow enthusiastic over
The Voyage of the Beagle |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Democracy In America, Volume 2 by Alexis de Toqueville: new tendencies to which the fractional distribution of mankind
had given birth. Men continued to worship an only God, the
Creator and Preserver of all things; but every people, every
city, and, so to speak, every man, thought to obtain some
distinct privilege, and win the favor of an especial
patron at the foot of the Throne of Grace. Unable to subdivide
the Deity, they multiplied and improperly enhanced the importance
of the divine agents. The homage due to saints and angels became
an almost idolatrous worship amongst the majority of the
Christian world; and apprehensions might be entertained for a
moment lest the religion of Christ should retrograde towards the
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