| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Alcibiades I by Plato: you allow that the just is sometimes expedient and sometimes not?
ALCIBIADES: Yes.
SOCRATES: And sometimes honourable and sometimes not?
ALCIBIADES: What do you mean?
SOCRATES: I am asking if you ever knew any one who did what was
dishonourable and yet just?
ALCIBIADES: Never.
SOCRATES: All just things are honourable?
ALCIBIADES: Yes.
SOCRATES: And are honourable things sometimes good and sometimes not good,
or are they always good?
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Wife, et al by Anton Chekhov: and stone which would last a thousand years, could not keep from
me the thought, "It's not for long . . . .it's no use." If in
time Butyga's cupboard and my bridge should come under the notice
of some sensible historian of art, he would say: "These were two
men remarkable in their own way: Butyga loved his
fellow-creatures and would not admit the thought that they might
die and be annihilated, and so when he made his furniture he had
the immortal man in his mind. The engineer Asorin did not love
life or his fellow-creatures; even in the happy moments of
creation, thoughts of death, of finiteness and dissolution, were
not alien to him, and we see how insignificant and finite, how
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from St. Ives by Robert Louis Stevenson: himself. I had no hold upon the boy, and pretermitted my design
till I should have laid court to him and engaged his interest. He
was prodigiously embarrassed, not having previously addressed me
otherwise than by a bow and blushes; and he advanced to me with an
air of one stubbornly performing a duty, like a raw soldier under
fire. I laid down my carving; greeted him with a good deal of
formality, such as I thought he would enjoy; and finding him to
remain silent, branched off into narratives of my campaigns such as
Goguelat himself might have scrupled to endorse. He visibly thawed
and brightened; drew more near to where I sat; forgot his timidity
so far as to put many questions; and at last, with another blush,
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