| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Reminiscences of Tolstoy by Leo Tolstoy: contradiction of thought.
"If a horseman sees that his horse is tired out, he must not
remain seated on its back and hold up its head, but simply get
off," he used to say, condemning all the charities of the well-fed
people who sit on the back of the working classes, continue to
enjoy all the benefits of their privileged position, and merely
give from their superfluity.
He did not believe in the good of such charity and considered
it a form of self-hallucination, all the more harmful because
people thereby acquire a sort of moral right to continue that idle,
aristocratic life and get to go on increasing the poverty of the
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Symposium by Plato: wisdom, and be the friend of God and heir of immortality.
Such, Phaedrus, is the tale which I heard from the stranger of Mantinea,
and which you may call the encomium of love, or what you please.
The company applaud the speech of Socrates, and Aristophanes is about to
say something, when suddenly a band of revellers breaks into the court, and
the voice of Alcibiades is heard asking for Agathon. He is led in drunk,
and welcomed by Agathon, whom he has come to crown with a garland. He is
placed on a couch at his side, but suddenly, on recognizing Socrates, he
starts up, and a sort of conflict is carried on between them, which Agathon
is requested to appease. Alcibiades then insists that they shall drink,
and has a large wine-cooler filled, which he first empties himself, and
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Message by Honore de Balzac: vehicle and clinging tightly to the roof, as I did. He either
miscalculated in some way, or he slipped; how it happened, I do
not know, but the coach fell over upon him, and he was crushed
under it.
We carried him into a peasant's cottage, and there, amid the
moans wrung from him by horrible sufferings, he contrived to give
me a commission--a sacred task, in that it was laid upon me by a
dying man's last wish. Poor boy, all through his agony he was
torturing himself in his young simplicity of heart with the
thought of the painful shock to his mistress when she should
suddenly read of his death in a newspaper. He begged me to go
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