| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Walking by Henry David Thoreau: of mother-wit derived from that same leopard to which I have
referred.
We have heard of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge.
It is said that knowledge is power, and the like. Methinks there
is equal need of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Ignorance,
what we will call Beautiful Knowledge, a knowledge useful in a
higher sense: for what is most of our boasted so-called knowledge
but a conceit that we know something, which robs us of the
advantage of our actual ignorance? What we call knowledge is
often our positive ignorance; ignorance our negative knowledge.
By long years of patient industry and reading of the
Walking |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Pierre Grassou by Honore de Balzac: 12th he was appointed an officer of the Legion of honor. He is a major
in the National Guard. The Museum of Versailles felt it incumbent to
order a battle-piece of so excellent a citizen, who thereupon walked
about Paris to meet his old comrades and have the happiness of saying
to them:--
"The King has given me an order for the Museum of Versailles."
Madame de Fougeres adores her husband, to whom she has presented two
children. This painter, a good father and a good husband, is unable to
eradicate from his heart a fatal thought, namely, that artists laugh
at his work; that his name is a term of contempt in the studios; and
that the feuilletons take no notice of his pictures. But he still
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Twelve Stories and a Dream by H. G. Wells: his life that he hadn't made a perfect mess of--and through all
the wastes of eternity he never would. If he had had sympathy,
perhaps--. He paused at that, and stood regarding me. He remarked that,
strange as it might seem to me, nobody, not any one, ever, had given
him the amount of sympathy I was doing now. I could see what he wanted
straight away, and I determined to head him off at once. I may be a
brute, you know, but being the Only Real Friend, the recipient of the
confidences of one of these egotistical weaklings, ghost or body, is
beyond my physical endurance. I got up briskly. 'Don't you brood on
these things too much,' I said. 'The thing you've got to do is to get
out of this get out of this--sharp. You pull yourself together and
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