| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Another Study of Woman by Honore de Balzac: to affect Free-thought, she will try to convert you, for you will have
opened the way for the stereotyped phrases, the head-shaking and
gestures understood by all these women: 'For shame! I thought you had
too much sense to attack religion. Society is tottering, and you
deprive it of its support. Why, religion at this moment means you and
me; it is property, and the future of our children! Ah! let us not be
selfish! Individualism is the disease of the age, and religion is the
only remedy; it unites families which your laws put asunder,' and so
forth. Then she plunges into some neo-Christian speech sprinkled with
political notions which is neither Catholic nor Protestant--but moral?
Oh! deuced moral!--in which you may recognize a fag end of every
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Village Rector by Honore de Balzac: straight as a die,--there! One day they surprised him with three of
his comrades; two were wounded, one was killed,--good! Farrabesche was
all but taken. Bah! he just sprang on the horse of one of the
gendarmes behind the man, pricked the horse with his knife, made it
run with all its might, and so disappeared, holding the gendarme tight
round the body. But he held him so tight that after a time he threw
the body on the ground and rode away alone on the horse and master of
the horse; and he had the cheek to go and sell it not thirty miles
from Limoges! After that affair he hid himself for three months and
was never seen. The authorities offered a hundred golden louis to
whoever would deliver him up."
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Golden Sayings of Epictetus by Epictetus: attractive.
CXIX
Kings and tyrants have armed guards wherewith to chastise
certain persons, though they themselves be evil. But to the Cynic
conscience gives this power--not arms and guards. When he knows
that he has watched and laboured on behalf of mankind: that sleep
hath found him pure, and left him purer still: that his thoughts
have been the thought of a Friend of the Gods--of a servant, yet
one that hath a part in the government of the Supreme God: that
the words are ever on his lips:--
Lead me, O God, and thou, O Destiny!
The Golden Sayings of Epictetus |
