| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Koran: patrons, verily, he is of them, and, verily, God guides not an
unjust people.
Thou wilt see those in whose hearts is a sickness vieing with
them; they say, 'We fear lest there befall us a reverse.' It may be
God will give the victory, or an order from Himself, and they may
awake repenting of what they thought in secret to themselves.
Those who believe say, 'Are these they who swore by God with their
most strenuous oath that they were surely with you?'- their works
are in vain and they shall wake the losers.
O ye who believe! whoso is turned away from his religion- God will
bring (instead) a people whom He loves and who love Him, lowly to
The Koran |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Talisman by Walter Scott: persuasion that this must be the case, the knight advanced to the
shrine, and kneeling down before it, repeated his devotions with
fervency, during which his attention was disturbed by the curtain
being suddenly raised, or rather pulled aside, how or by whom he
saw not; but in the niche which was thus disclosed he beheld a
cabinet of silver and ebony, with a double folding-door, the
whole formed into the miniature resemblance of a Gothic church.
As he gazed with anxious curiosity on the shrine, the two
folding-doors also flew open, discovering a large piece of wood,
on which were blazoned the words, VERA CRUX; at the same time a
choir of female voices sung GLORIA PATRI. The instant the strain
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Soul of the Far East by Percival Lowell: make bits of discontinuous distance take the place effectively of
continuous space.
Far Eastern pictures are epigrams rather than descriptions.
They present a bit of nature with the terseness of a maxim of
La Rochefoucault, and they delight as aphorisms do by their insight
and the happy conciseness of its expression. Few aphorisms are
absolutely true, but then boldness more than makes up for what they
lack in verity. So complex a subject is life that to state a truth
with all its accompanying limitations is to weaken it at once.
Exceptions, while demonstrating the rule, do not tend to emphasize it.
And though the whole truth is essential to science, such
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