| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Exiles by Honore de Balzac: organs of sight. His eyes, no doubt, were seeing then the remoter
images which the grave has in store for us.
Never, perhaps, had this man presented so grand an aspect. A terrible
struggle was going on in his soul, and reacted on his outer frame;
strong man as he seemed to be, he bent as a reed bows under the breeze
that comes before a storm. Godefroid stood motionless, speechless,
spellbound; some inexplicable force nailed him to the floor; and, as
happens when our attention takes us out of ourselves while watching a
fire or a battle, he was wholly unconscious of his body.
"Shall I tell you the fate to which you were hastening, poor angel of
love? Listen! It has been given to me to see immeasurable space,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Sanitary and Social Lectures by Charles Kingsley: recreate their over-burdened minds. Such cases, doubtless, are
far less common than they were fifty years ago: but why? Is not
the decrease of drinking among the richer classes certainly due to
the increased refinement and variety of their tastes and
occupations? In cultivating the aesthetic side of man's nature;
in engaging him with the beautiful, the pure, the wonderful, the
truly natural; with painting, poetry, music, horticulture,
physical science--in all this lies recreation, in the true and
literal sense of that word, namely, the re-creating and mending of
the exhausted mind and feelings, such as no rational man will now
neglect, either for himself, his children, or his workpeople.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from I Have A Dream by Martin Luther King, Jr.: the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial
injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood.
It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the
moment and to underestimate the determination of the Negro. This
sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not
pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and
equality. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning.
Those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will
now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns
to business as usual. There will be neither rest nor tranquility
in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The
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