| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from De Profundis by Oscar Wilde: the sphere of Art is the sole secret of creation. He understood
the leprosy of the leper, the darkness of the blind, the fierce
misery of those who live for pleasure, the strange poverty of the
rich. Some one wrote to me in trouble, 'When you are not on your
pedestal you are not interesting.' How remote was the writer from
what Matthew Arnold calls 'the Secret of Jesus.' Either would have
taught him that whatever happens to another happens to oneself, and
if you want an inscription to read at dawn and at night-time, and
for pleasure or for pain, write up on the walls of your house in
letters for the sun to gild and the moon to silver, 'Whatever
happens to oneself happens to another.'
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from De Profundis by Oscar Wilde: it, is a complex example, and a flower or a child a simple example,
of what I mean; but sorrow is the ultimate type both in life and
art.
Behind joy and laughter there may be a temperament, coarse, hard
and callous. But behind sorrow there is always sorrow. Pain,
unlike pleasure, wears no mask. Truth in art is not any
correspondence between the essential idea and the accidental
existence; it is not the resemblance of shape to shadow, or of the
form mirrored in the crystal to the form itself; it is no echo
coming from a hollow hill, any more than it is a silver well of
water in the valley that shows the moon to the moon and Narcissus
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Concerning Christian Liberty by Martin Luther: unclean, to him it is unclean. It is evil for that man who eateth
with offence" (Rom. xiv. 14, 20).
Thus, though we ought boldly to resist those teachers of
tradition, and though the laws of the pontiffs, by which they
make aggressions on the people of God, deserve sharp reproof, yet
we must spare the timid crowd, who are held captive by the laws
of those impious tyrants, till they are set free. Fight
vigorously against the wolves, but on behalf of the sheep, not
against the sheep. And this you may do by inveighing against the
laws and lawgivers, and yet at the same time observing these laws
with the weak, lest they be offended, until they shall themselves
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