| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from De Profundis by Oscar Wilde: and that those things that are meant for me as much as for anybody
else - the beauty of the sun and moon, the pageant of the seasons,
the music of daybreak and the silence of great nights, the rain
falling through the leaves, or the dew creeping over the grass and
making it silver - would all be tainted for me, and lose their
healing power, and their power of communicating joy. To regret
one's own experiences is to arrest one's own development. To deny
one's own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one's own
life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.
For just as the body absorbs things of all kinds, things common and
unclean no less than those that the priest or a vision has
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from An Old Maid by Honore de Balzac: friends, the Marquis de Pombreton, formerly lieutenant in the Black
mousquetaires, returned to him--so he said--twelve hundred pistoles
which he had lent to the marquis for the purpose of emigrating. This
event made a sensation; it was used later to refute the sarcasms of
the "Constitutionnel," on the method employed by some emigres in
paying their debts. When this noble act of the Marquis de Pombreton
was lauded before the chevalier, the good man reddened even to his
right cheek. Every one rejoiced frankly at this windfall for Monsieur
de Valois, who went about consulting moneyed people as to the safest
manner of investing this fragment of his past opulence. Confiding in
the future of the Restoration, he finally placed his money on the
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Ancient Regime by Charles Kingsley: of Russia, with all her sins. To take the most extreme instance--
Voltaire. We may question his being a philosopher at all. We may
deny that he had even a tincture of formal philosophy. We may doubt
much whether he had any of that human and humorous common sense,
which is often a good substitute for the philosophy of the schools.
We may feel against him a just and honest indignation when we
remember that he dared to travestie into a foul satire the tale of
his country's purest and noblest heroine; but we must recollect, at
the same time, that he did a public service to the morality of his
own country, and of all Europe, by his indignation--quite as just
and honest as any which we may feel--at the legal murder of Calas.
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