| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Fantastic Fables by Ambrose Bierce: upon himself, said:
"Your costume looks as if you might have come out of the
penitentiary."
"Appearances are deceitful," replied the Zebra, smiling in the
consciousness of a more insupportable wit, "or I should have to
think that you had come out of the Legislature."
A Matter of Method
A PHILOSOPHER seeing a Fool beating his Donkey, said:
"Abstain, my son, abstain, I implore. Those who resort to violence
shall suffer from violence."
"That," said the Fool, diligently belabouring the animal, "is what
Fantastic Fables |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Essays & Lectures by Oscar Wilde: For the very first requisite for any scientific conception of
history is the doctrine of uniform sequence: in other words, that
certain events having happened, certain other events corresponding
to them will happen also; that the past is the key of the future.
Now at the birth of this great conception science, it is true,
presided, yet religion it was which at the outset clothed it in its
own garb, and familiarised men with it by appealing to their hearts
first and then to their intellects; knowing that at the beginning
of things it is through the moral nature, and not through the
intellectual, that great truths are spread.
So in Herodotus, who may be taken as a representative of the
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Republic by Plato: time for coddling: if they recover, well; if they don't, there is an end
of them.' Whereas the rich man is supposed to be a gentleman who can
afford to be ill. Do you know a maxim of Phocylides--that 'when a man
begins to be rich' (or, perhaps, a little sooner) 'he should practise
virtue'? But how can excessive care of health be inconsistent with an
ordinary occupation, and yet consistent with that practice of virtue which
Phocylides inculcates? When a student imagines that philosophy gives him a
headache, he never does anything; he is always unwell. This was the reason
why Asclepius and his sons practised no such art. They were acting in the
interest of the public, and did not wish to preserve useless lives, or
raise up a puny offspring to wretched sires. Honest diseases they honestly
The Republic |
