| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Philebus by Plato: PROTARCHUS: Indeed!
SOCRATES: They say that what the school of Philebus calls pleasures are
all of them only avoidances of pain.
PROTARCHUS: And would you, Socrates, have us agree with them?
SOCRATES: Why, no, I would rather use them as a sort of diviners, who
divine the truth, not by rules of art, but by an instinctive repugnance and
extreme detestation which a noble nature has of the power of pleasure, in
which they think that there is nothing sound, and her seductive influence
is declared by them to be witchcraft, and not pleasure. This is the use
which you may make of them. And when you have considered the various
grounds of their dislike, you shall hear from me what I deem to be true
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Complete Poems of Longfellow by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: The plover's call, the curlew's cry,
Sing in his brain.
Touched by his hand, the wayside weed
Becomes a flower; the lowliest reed
Beside the stream
Is clothed with beauty; gorse and grass
And heather, where his footsteps pass,
The brighter seem.
He sings of love, whose flame illumes
The darkness of lone cottage rooms;
He feels the force,
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Dreams by Olive Schreiner: day all was quiet, but at night, when the stars shone or the moon glinted
on the tree-tops, and all was quiet below, if one crept here quite alone
and knelt on the steps of the stone altar, and uncovering one's breast, so
wounded it that the blood fell down on the altar steps, then whatever he
who knelt there wished for was granted him. And all this happens, as I
said, because it is a far-off world, and things often happen there as they
do not happen here.
Now, the man and woman walked together; and the woman wished well to the
man. One night when the moon was shining so that the leaves of all the
trees glinted, and the waves of the sea were silvery, the woman walked
alone to the forest. It was dark there; the moonlight fell only in little
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