| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Treatise on Parents and Children by George Bernard Shaw: Lilliputians. We are a mass of people living in a submissive routine
to which we have been drilled from our childhood. When you ask us to
take the simplest step outside that routine, we say shyly, "Oh, I
really couldnt," or "Oh, I shouldnt like to," without being able to
point out the smallest harm that could possibly ensue: victims, not
of a rational fear of real dangers, but of pure abstract fear, the
quintessence of cowardice, the very negation of "the fear of God."
Dotted about among us are a few spirits relatively free from this
inculcated paralysis, sometimes because they are half-witted,
sometimes because they are unscrupulously selfish, sometimes because
they are realists as to money and unimaginative as to other things,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Songs of Innocence and Experience by William Blake: And he hears the ewes' tender reply;
He is watchful while they are in peace,
For they know when their shepherd is nigh.
THE ECHOING GREEN
The sun does arise,
And make happy the skies;
The merry bells ring
To welcome the Spring;
The skylark and thrush,
The birds of the bush,
Sing louder around
Songs of Innocence and Experience |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Protagoras by Plato: which tends to show that virtue can certainly be taught; for if virtue were
other than knowledge, as Protagoras attempted to prove, then clearly virtue
cannot be taught; but if virtue is entirely knowledge, as you are seeking
to show, then I cannot but suppose that virtue is capable of being taught.
Protagoras, on the other hand, who started by saying that it might be
taught, is now eager to prove it to be anything rather than knowledge; and
if this is true, it must be quite incapable of being taught.' Now I,
Protagoras, perceiving this terrible confusion of our ideas, have a great
desire that they should be cleared up. And I should like to carry on the
discussion until we ascertain what virtue is, whether capable of being
taught or not, lest haply Epimetheus should trip us up and deceive us in
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