| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Iron Puddler by James J. Davis: I also brought along a flour sack half full of biscuits, cold
pancakes, corn bread, chicken necks and wings and scraps of
roasts and steaks. These hungry men, with their schooners of
beer, made a feast of these scraps. My loyalty in coming every
night and giving them everything I could scrape together touched
them deeply. They regarded me as deserving special honor, and
while they believed in democracy as a general proposition, they
voted that it would be carrying equality too far if they
permitted me to get no more out of my work than all the rest got.
So they decided that I was to have a fifteen-cent bed each night
instead of a five-cent flop with the rest of them. And I was
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Golden Sayings of Epictetus by Epictetus: by another. Ask not the usual questions, Were they born of the
same parents, reared together, and under the same tutor; but ask
this only, in what they place their real interest--whether in
outward things or in the Will. If in outward things, call them
not friends, any more than faithful, constant, brave or free:
call them not even human beings, if you have any sense. . . . But
should you hear that these men hold the Good to lie only in the
Will, only in rightly dealing with the things of sense, take no
more trouble to inquire whether they are father and son or
brothers, or comrades of long standing; but, sure of this one
thing, pronounce as boldly that they are friends as that they are
The Golden Sayings of Epictetus |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell: beaten a path called the Peachtree Trail. They were proud of the
place, proud of its growth, proud of themselves for making it
grow. Let the older towns call Atlanta anything they pleased.
Atlanta did not care.
Scarlett had always liked Atlanta for the very same reasons that
made Savannah, Augusta and Macon condemn it. Like herself, the
town was a mixture of the old and new in Georgia, in which the old
often came off second best in its conflicts with the self-willed
and vigorous new. Moreover, there was something personal,
exciting about a town that was born--or at least christened--the
same year she was christened.
Gone With the Wind |
