经典英语美文阅读摘抄

2016-12-09

经典英语美文阅读：第一场雪

How beautiful it was, falling so silently all day long, all night long, on the mountains, on the meadows, on the roofs of the living, on the graves of the dead!

All white save the river, that marked its course by a winding black line across the landscape; and the leafless trees, that against the leaden sky now revealed more fully the wonderful beauty and intricacies of their branches.

What silence, too, came with the snow, and what seclusion! Every sound was muffled, every noise changed to something soft and musical.

No more tramping hoofs, no more rattling wheels!

Only the chiming of sleigh-bells, beating as swift and merrily as the hearts of children.

经典英语美文阅读：生命的起跑线

"We are reading the first verse of the first chapter of a book whose pages are infinite..."

I do not know who wrote those words,but I have always liked them as a reminder that the future can be anything we want to make it.We can take the mysterious,hazy future and carve out of it anything that we can imagine,just as a sculptor carves a statue from a shapeless stone.

We are all in the position of the farmer.If we plant a good seed,we reap a good harvest.If our seed is poor and full of weeds,we reap a useless crop.If we plant nothing at all,we harvest nothing at all.I want the future to be better than the past.I don't want it contaminated by the mistakes and errors with which history is filled.We should all be concerned about the future because that is where we will spend the remainder of our lives. The past is gone and static.Nothing we can do will change it.The future is before us and dynamic.Everything we do will affect it.Each day brings with it new frontiers, in our homes and in our business, if we will only recognize them.We are just at the beginning of the progress in every field of human endeavor.

经典英语美文阅读：坚持不懈

Are you dissatisfied with today’s success? It is the harvest from yesterday’s sowing. Do you dream of a golden morrow? You will reap what you are sowing today. We get out of life just what we put into it.

Nature takes on our moods: she laughs with those who laugh and weeps with those who weep. If we rejoice and are glad, the very birds sing more sweetly, the woods and streams murmur our song. But if we are sad and sorrowful, a sudden gloom falls upon Nature’s face; the sun shines, but not in our hearts; the birds sing, but not to us.

The future will be just what we make it. Our purpose will give it its character. One’s resolution is one’s prophecy. Leave all your discouraging pessimism behind. Do not prophesy evil, but good. Men of hope come to the front.

经典英语美文阅读：幸福之路

It is a commonplace among moralists that you cannot get happiness by pursuing it. This is only true if you pursue it unwisely. Gamblers at Monte Carlo are pursuing money, and most of them lose it instead, but there are other ways of pursuing money, which often succeed. So it is with happiness. If you pursue it by means of drink, you are forgetting the hangover.

Epicurus pursued it by living only in congenial society and eating only dry bread, supplemented by a little cheese on feast days. His method proved successful in his case, but he was a valetudinarian, and most people would need something more vigorous.

For most people, the pursuit of happiness, unless supplemented in various ways, is too abstract and theoretical to be adequate as a personal rule of life. But I think that whatever personal rule of life you may choose it should not, except in rare and heroic cases, be incompatible with happiness.If you look around at the men and women whom you can call happy, will see that they all have certain things in common. The most important of these things is an activity which at most gradually builds up something that you are glad to see coming into existence.

Women who take an instinctive pleasure in their children can get this kind of satisfaction out of bringing up a family. Artists and authors and men of science get happiness in this way if their own work seems good to them. But there are many humbler forms of the same kind of pleasure. Many men who spend their working life in the city devote their weekends to voluntary and unremunerated toil in their gardens, and when the spring comes, they experience all the joys of having created beauty.

The whole subject of happiness has, in my opinion, been treated too solemnly. It had been thought that man cannot be happy without a theory of life or a religion. Perhaps those who have been rendered unhappy by a bad theory may need a better theory to help them to recover, just as you may need a tonic when you have been ill. But when things are normal a man should be healthy ]without a tonic and happy without a theory. It is the simple things that really matter.

If a man delights in his wife and children, has success in work, and finds pleasure in the alternation of day and night, spring and autumn, he will be happy whatever his philosophy may be. If, on the other hand, he finds his wife fateful, his children’s noise unendurable, and the office a nightmare; if in the daytime he longs for night, and at night sighs for the light of day, then what he needs is not a new philosophy but a new regimen—a different diet, or more exercise, or what not.

Man is an animal, and his happiness depends on his physiology more than he likes to think. This is a humble conclusion, but I cannot make myself disbelieve it. Unhappy businessmen, I am would increase their happiness more by walking six miles every day than by any conceivable change of philosophy.