| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Virginibus Puerisque by Robert Louis Stevenson: patient spectators of our own pitiable change! The Permanent
Possibility is preserved, but the sensations carefully held at
arm's length, as if one kept a photographic plate in a dark
chamber. It is better to lose health like a spendthrift than
to waste it like a miser. It is better to live and be done
with it, than to die daily in the sickroom. By all means
begin your folio; even if the doctor does not give you a year,
even if he hesitates about a month, make one brave push and
see what can be accomplished in a week. It is not only in
finished undertakings that we ought to honour useful labour.
A spirit goes out of the man who means execution, which out-
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Reminiscences of Tolstoy by Leo Tolstoy: Although from the newspapers and from the accounts brought by
those who came from the famine-stricken parts he already knew about
the extent of the peasantry's disaster, nevertheless, when his old
friend Ivánovitch Rayóvsky called on him at
Yásnaya Polyána and proposed that he should drive
through to the Dankóvski
¹Be loved by them.
District with him in order to see the state of things in the
villages for himself, he readily agreed, and went with him to his
property at Begitchóvka.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Ebb-Tide by Stevenson & Osbourne: 'One did it single-handed,' said Attwater, 'because there was
nobody to help one.'
'By God, but you must be a holy terror!' cried the captain, in
a glow of admiration.
'One does one's best,' said Attwater.
'Well, now!' said Davis, 'I have seen a lot of driving in my
time and been counted a good driver myself; I fought my way,
third mate, round the Cape Horn with a push of packet rats
that would have turned the devil out of hell and shut the door
on him; and I tell you, this racket of Mr Attwater's takes the
cake. In a ship, why, there ain't nothing to it! You've got the
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