| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Cromwell by William Shakespeare: Which scarcely stood me in three hundreth pound.
I bought them at an easy kind of rate;
I care not which way they came by them
That sold them me, it comes not near my heart:
And least thy should be stolen--as sure they are--
I thought it meet to sell them here in Antwerp,
And so have left them in the Governour's hand,
Who offers me within two hundreth pound
Of all my price. But now no more of that:
I must go see and if my bills be safe,
The which I sent to master Cromwell,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Twelve Stories and a Dream by H. G. Wells: Mr. Snooks saw them off from Rome with that pathetic interrogative
perplexity still on his face, and if it had not been for Helen
he would have retained Miss Winchelsea's hold-all in his hand
as a sort of encyclopaedic keepsake. On their way back to England
Miss Winchelsea on six separate occasions made Fanny promise
to write to her the longest of long letters. Fanny, it seemed, would
be quite near Mr. Snooks. Her new school--she was always going
to new schools--would be only five miles from Steely Bank, and
it was in the Steely Bank Polytechnic, and one or two first-class
schools, that Mr. Snooks did his teaching. He might even see her
at times. They could not talk much of him--she and Fanny always
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Apology by Plato: mythology current in his age. Yet he abstains from saying that he believed
in the gods whom the State approved. He does not defend himself, as
Xenophon has defended him, by appealing to his practice of religion.
Probably he neither wholly believed, nor disbelieved, in the existence of
the popular gods; he had no means of knowing about them. According to
Plato (compare Phaedo; Symp.), as well as Xenophon (Memor.), he was
punctual in the performance of the least religious duties; and he must have
believed in his own oracular sign, of which he seemed to have an internal
witness. But the existence of Apollo or Zeus, or the other gods whom the
State approves, would have appeared to him both uncertain and unimportant
in comparison of the duty of self-examination, and of those principles of
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