| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Altar of the Dead by Henry James: fixed, and he had lost before fairly tasting it an affection that
promised to fill his life to the brim.
Of that benediction, however, it would have been false to say this
life could really be emptied: it was still ruled by a pale ghost,
still ordered by a sovereign presence. He had not been a man of
numerous passions, and even in all these years no sense had grown
stronger with him than the sense of being bereft. He had needed no
priest and no altar to make him for ever widowed. He had done many
things in the world - he had done almost all but one: he had
never, never forgotten. He had tried to put into his existence
whatever else might take up room in it, but had failed to make it
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Treatise on Parents and Children by George Bernard Shaw: there is a good deal of social intercourse, and the family, instead of
keeping itself to itself, as the evil old saying is, and glowering at
the neighbors over the blinds of the long street in which nobody knows
his neighbor and everyone wishes to deceive him as to his income and
social importance, is in effect broken up by school life, by
out-of-door habits, and by frank neighborly intercourse through dances
and concerts and theatricals and excursions and the like, families of
four may turn out much less barbarous citizens than families of ten
which attain the Boer ideal of being out of sight of one another's
chimney smoke.
All one can say is, roughly, that the homelier the home, and the more
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from On the Duty of Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau: A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance,
nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority.
There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men.
When the majority shall at length vote for the abolition of
slavery, it will be because they are indifferent to slavery,
or because there is but little slavery left to be abolished
by their vote. They will then be the only slaves. Only his
vote can hasten the abolition of slavery who asserts his own
freedom by his vote.
I hear of a convention to be held at Baltimore, or
elsewhere, for the selection of a candidate for the
On the Duty of Civil Disobedience |
