| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Verses 1889-1896 by Rudyard Kipling: Where the sea-egg flames on the coral and the long-backed breakers croon
Their endless ocean legends to the lazy, locked lagoon.
"Strayed amid lonely islets, mazed amid outer keys,
I waked the palms to laughter -- I tossed the scud in the breeze --
Never was isle so little, never was sea so lone,
But over the scud and the palm-trees an English flag was flown.
"I have wrenched it free from the halliard to hang for a wisp on the Horn;
I have chased it north to the Lizard -- ribboned and rolled and torn;
I have spread its fold o'er the dying, adrift in a hopeless sea;
Verses 1889-1896 |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Z. Marcas by Honore de Balzac: progress of affairs in France and in Europe were enough to prove to us
that he was a real statesman; for a man may be quickly and easily
judged when he can be brought on to the ground of immediate
difficulties: there is a certain Shibboleth for men of superior
talents, and we were of the tribe of modern Levites without belonging
as yet to the Temple. As I have said, our frivolity covered certain
purposes which Juste has carried out, and which I am about to execute.
When we had done talking, we all three went out, cold as it was, to
walk in the Luxembourg gardens till the dinner hour. In the course of
that walk our conversation, grave throughout, turned on the painful
aspects of the political situation. Each of us contributed his
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Start in Life by Honore de Balzac: Georges to the farmer.
"Twenty francs for his breakfast!" cried Oscar; "in all, more than
thirty-odd francs since we started!"
Killed by a sense of his inferiority, Oscar sat down on a stone post,
lost in a revery which did not allow him to perceive that his
trousers, drawn up by the effect of his position, showed the point of
junction between the old top of his stocking and the new "footing,"--
his mother's handiwork.
"We are brothers in socks," said Mistigris, pulling up his own
trousers sufficiently to show an effect of the same kind,--"'By the
footing, Hercules.'"
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