| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Study of a Woman by Honore de Balzac: marquise shows precisely enough religious devotion to attain under a
new Maintenon to the gloomy piety of the last days of Louis XIV., and
enough worldliness to adopt the habits of gallantry of the first years
of that reign, should it ever be revived. At the present moment she is
strictly virtuous from policy, possibly from inclination. Married for
the last seven years to the Marquis de Listomere, one of those
deputies who expect a peerage, she may also consider that such conduct
will promote the ambitions of her family. Some women are reserving
their opinion of her until the moment when Monsieur de Listomere
becomes a peer of France, when she herself will be thirty-six years of
age,--a period of life when most women discover that they are the
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Prince by Nicolo Machiavelli: ought to be honoured and loved; those who do not bind themselves may
be dealt with in two ways; they may fail to do this through
pusillanimity and a natural want of courage, in which case you ought
to make use of them, especially of those who are of good counsel; and
thus, whilst in prosperity you honour them, in adversity you do not
have to fear them. But when for their own ambitious ends they shun
binding themselves, it is a token that they are giving more thought to
themselves than to you, and a prince out to guard against such, and to
fear them as if they were open enemies, because in adversity they
always help to ruin him.
Therefore, one who becomes a prince through the favour of the people
The Prince |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Man against the Sky by Edwin Arlington Robinson: And once or twice he was, not knowing it, --
Or knowing, being sorry for poor clay
And saying nothing. . . . Yet, for all his engines,
You'll meet a thousand of an afternoon
Who strut and sun themselves and see around 'em
A world made out of more that has a reason
Than his, I swear, that he sees here to-day;
Though he may scarcely give a Fool an exit
But we mark how he sees in everything
A law that, given we flout it once too often,
Brings fire and iron down on our naked heads.
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