| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Hiero by Xenophon: benefit our friends most largely, and beyond all else, to triumph over
our foes--here, again, matters are not as you suppose.
How, for instance, can you hope to benefit your friends, when you may
rest assured the very friend whom you have made most your debtor will
be the happiest to quit your sight as fast as may be? since nobody
believes that anything a tyrant gives him is indeed his own, until he
is well beyond the donor's jurisdiction.
So much for friends, and as to enemies conversely. How can you say
"most power of triumphing over our enemies," when every tyrant knows
full well they are all his enemies, every man of them, who are
despotically ruled by him? And to put the whole of them to death or to
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Koran: compact.
But for that they broke their compact, and for their misbelief in
God's signs, and for their killing the prophets undeservedly, and
for their saying, 'Our hearts are uncircumcised,'- nay, God hath
stamped on them their misbelief, so that they cannot believe except
a few,- and for their misbelief, and for their saying about Mary a
mighty calumny, and for their saying, 'Verily, we have killed the
Messiah, Jesus the son of Mary, the apostle of God,'...but they did
not kill him, and they did not crucify him, but a similitude was
made for them. And verily, those who differ about him are in doubt
concerning him; they have no knowledge concerning him, but only follow
The Koran |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Letters of Two Brides by Honore de Balzac: deeply I enter into its spirit, the clearer does it become to me that
it is the letter, not of a woman, but of a child. You are the same old
Louise, and you forget, what I used to repeat over and over again to
you, that the passion of love belongs rightly to a state of nature,
and has only been purloined by civilization. So fleeting is its
character, that the resources of society are powerless to modify its
primitive condition, and it becomes the effort of all noble minds to
make a man of the infant Cupid. But, as you yourself admit, such love
ceases to be natural.
Society, my dear abhors sterility; but substituting a lasting
sentiment for the mere passing frenzy of nature, it has succeeded in
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