| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from God The Invisible King by H. G. Wells: and through us except separate us from God.
Yet let there be no mistake about one thing. Here prayer is a
power. Here God can indeed work miracles. A man with the light of
God in his heart can defeat vicious habits, rise again combative and
undaunted after a hundred falls, escape from the grip of lusts and
revenges, make head against despair, thrust back the very onset of
madness. He is still the same man he was before he came to God,
still with his libidinous, vindictive, boastful, or indolent vein;
but now his will to prevail over those qualities can refer to an
exterior standard and an external interest, he can draw upon a
strength, almost boundless, beyond his own.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Essays & Lectures by Oscar Wilde: THE ENGLISH RENAISSANCE OF ART
AMONG the many debts which we owe to the supreme aesthetic faculty
of Goethe is that he was the first to teach us to define beauty in
terms the most concrete possible, to realise it, I mean, always in
its special manifestations. So, in the lecture which I have the
honour to deliver before you, I will not try to give you any
abstract definition of beauty - any such universal formula for it
as was sought for by the philosophy of the eighteenth century -
still less to communicate to you that which in its essence is
incommunicable, the virtue by which a particular picture or poem
affects us with a unique and special joy; but rather to point out
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Paradise Lost by John Milton: Not in despair, to have found themselves not lost
In loss itself; which on his countenance cast
Like doubtful hue. But he, his wonted pride
Soon recollecting, with high words, that bore
Semblance of worth, not substance, gently raised
Their fainting courage, and dispelled their fears.
Then straight commands that, at the warlike sound
Of trumpets loud and clarions, be upreared
His mighty standard. That proud honour claimed
Azazel as his right, a Cherub tall:
Who forthwith from the glittering staff unfurled
Paradise Lost |
