| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Tao Teh King by Lao-tze: to conduct affairs without (feeling the) trouble of them; to taste
without discerning any flavour; to consider what is small as great,
and a few as many; and to recompense injury with kindness.
2. (The master of it) anticipates things that are difficult while they
are easy, and does things that would become great while they are
small. All difficult things in the world are sure to arise from a
previous state in which they were easy, and all great things from one
in which they were small. Therefore the sage, while he never does
what is great, is able on that account to accomplish the greatest
things.
3. He who lightly promises is sure to keep but little faith; he who is
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Art of Writing by Robert Louis Stevenson: web. Tight as the versifier may draw the knot of logic, yet
for the ear he still leaves the tissue of the sentence
floating somewhat loose. In prose, the sentence turns upon a
pivot, nicely balanced, and fits into itself with an
obtrusive neatness like a puzzle. The ear remarks and is
singly gratified by this return and balance; while in verse
it is all diverted to the measure. To find comparable
passages is hard; for either the versifier is hugely the
superior of the rival, or, if he be not, and still persist in
his more delicate enterprise, he fails to be as widely his
inferior. But let us select them from the pages of the same
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Ancient Regime by Charles Kingsley: Two great inventive geniuses we may see dimly through the abysses of
the past, both of whom must have become in their time great chiefs,
founders of mighty aristocracies--it may be, worshipped after their
death as gods.
The first, who seems to have existed after the age in which the
black race colonised Australia, must have been surely a man worthy
to hold rank with our Brindleys, Watts, and Stephensons. For he
invented (and mind, one man must have invented the thing first, and
by the very nature of it, invented it all at once) an instrument so
singular, unexpected, unlike anything to be seen in nature, that I
wonder it has not been called, like the plough, the olive, or the
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