| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia by Samuel Johnson: live in the crowds of jollity, not so much to enjoy company as to
shun myself, and am only loud and merry to conceal my sadness."
"Every man," said Imlac, "may by examining his own mind guess what
passes in the minds of others. When you feel that your own gaiety
is counterfeit, it may justly lead you to suspect that of your
companions not to be sincere. Envy is commonly reciprocal. We are
long before we are convinced that happiness is never to be found,
and each believes it possessed by others, to keep alive the hope of
obtaining it for himself. In the assembly where you passed the
last night there appeared such sprightliness of air and volatility
of fancy as might have suited beings of a higher order, formed to
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce: to his head, he was conscious of nothing but a feeling of
fullness -- of congestion. These sensations were
unaccompanied by thought. The intellectual part of his
nature was already effaced; he had power only to feel, and
feeling was torment. He was conscious of motion.
Encompassed in a luminous cloud, of which he was now merely
the fiery heart, without material substance, he swung
through unthinkable arcs of oscillation, like a vast
pendulum. Then all at once, with terrible suddenness, the
light about him shot upward with the noise of a loud splash;
a frightful roaring was in his ears, and all was cold and
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Another Study of Woman by Honore de Balzac: "You have not known how to form a party," said Lord Dudley; "it will
be a long time yet before you have a policy. You talk a great deal in
France about organizing labor, and you have not yet organized
property. So this is what happens: Any duke--and even in the time of
Louis XVIII. and Charles X. there were some left who had two hundred
thousand francs a year, a magnificent residence, and a sumptuous train
of servants--well, such a duke could live like a great lord. The last
of these great gentlemen in France was the Prince de Talleyrand.--This
duke leaves four children, two of them girls. Granting that he has
great luck in marrying them all well, each of these descendants will
have but sixty or eighty thousand francs a year now; each is the
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