| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Symposium by Plato: love of something, and of something too which is wanting to a man?
Yes, he replied.
Remember further what you said in your speech, or if you do not remember I
will remind you: you said that the love of the beautiful set in order the
empire of the gods, for that of deformed things there is no love--did you
not say something of that kind?
Yes, said Agathon.
Yes, my friend, and the remark was a just one. And if this is true, Love
is the love of beauty and not of deformity?
He assented.
And the admission has been already made that Love is of something which a
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Moral Emblems by Robert Louis Stevenson: Ye who contemn the fatted slave
Look on this emblem, and be brave.
Poem: IV
See in the print how, moved by whim,
Trumpeting Jumbo, great and grim,
Adjusts his trunk, like a cravat,
To noose that individual's hat.
The sacred Ibis in the distance
Joys to observe his bold resistance.
Poem: V
Mark, printed on the opposing page,
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Atheist's Mass by Honore de Balzac: acquaintance before long with the odious and incessant warfare
waged by mediocrity against the superior man. If you should drop
five-and-twenty louis one day, you will be accused of gambling on
the next, and your best friends will report that you have lost
twenty-five thousand. If you have a headache, you will be
considered mad. If you are a little hasty, no one can live with
you. If, to make a stand against this armament of pigmies, you
collect your best powers, your best friends will cry out that you
want to have everything, that you aim at domineering, at tyranny.
In short, your good points will become your faults, your faults
will be vices, and your virtues crime.
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