| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg by Mark Twain: the beginning to the closing words, "And go to hell or Hadleyburg--
try and make it the for-or-m-e-r!" and in these special cases they
added a grand and agonised and imposing "A-a-a-a-MEN!"
The list dwindled, dwindled, dwindled, poor old Richards keeping
tally of the count, wincing when a name resembling his own was
pronounced, and waiting in miserable suspense for the time to come
when it would be his humiliating privilege to rise with Mary and
finish his plea, which he was intending to word thus: ". . . for
until now we have never done any wrong thing, but have gone our
humble way unreproached. We are very poor, we are old, and, have no
chick nor child to help us; we were sorely tempted, and we fell. It
The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Lost Continent by Edgar Rice Burroughs: that the sight of any human being could affect me as had
this unexpected discovery of Victory in the same room in
which I was, while I had thought of her for weeks either as
dead, or at best hundreds of miles to the west, and as
irretrievably lost to me as though she were, in truth, dead.
I was filled with a strange, mad impulse to be near her. It
was not enough merely to assist her, or protect her--I
desired to touch her--to take her in my arms. I was
astounded at myself. Another thing puzzled me--it was my
incomprehensible feeling of elation since I had again seen
her. With a fate worse than death staring her in the face,
Lost Continent |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Golden Sayings of Epictetus by Epictetus: given us so many things!
XXXVI
Asked how a man might convince himself that every single act
of his was under the eye of God, Epictetus answered:--
"Do you not hold that things on earth and things in heaven
are continuous and in unison with each other?"
"I do," was the reply.
"Else how should the trees so regularly, as though by God's
command, at His bidding flower; at His bidding send forth shoots,
bear fruit and ripen it; at His bidding let it fall and shed
their leaves, and folded up upon themselves lie in quietness and
The Golden Sayings of Epictetus |
