高考勵志英語美文摘抄
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高考勵志英語美文:Dreams Are the Stuff Life Is Made Of
By Carroll Carroll
I believe I am a very lucky man.
My entire life has been lived in the healthy area between too little and too much. I’ve never experienced financial or emotional insecurity, but everything I have, I’ve attained by my own work, not through indulgence, inheritance, or privilege.
Never having lived by the abuses of any extreme, I’ve always felt that a workman is worthy of his hire, a merchant entitled to his profit, an artist to his reward.
As a result of all this, my bargaining bump may be a little underdeveloped, so I’ve never tried to oversell myself. And though I may work for less than I know I can get, I find that because of this, I’m never so afraid of losing a job that I’m forced to compromise with my principles.
Naturally in a life as mentally, physically, emotionally, and financially fortunate as mine has been, a great many people have helped me. A few meant to, most did so by accident. I still feel I must reciprocate. This doesn’t mean that I’ve dedicated my life to my fellow man. I’m not the type. But I do feel I should help those I’m qualified to help, just as I’ve been helped by others.
What I’m saying now is, I feel, part of that pattern. I think everyone should, for his own sake, try to reduce to six hundred words the beliefs by which he lives—it’s not easy—and then compare those beliefs with what he enjoys—not in real estate and money and goods, but in love, health, happiness, and laughter.
I don’t believe we live our lives and then receive our reward or punishment in some afterlife. The life and the reward…the life and the punishment—these to me are one. This is my religion, coupled with a firm belief that there is a Supreme Being who planned this world and runs it so that “no man is an island, entire of himself…” The dishonesty of any one man subverts all honesty. The lack of ethics anywhere adulterates the whole world’s ethical content. In these—honesty and ethics—are, I think, the true spiritual values.
I believe the hope for a thoroughly honest and ethical society should never be laughed at. The most idealistic dreams have repeatedly forecast the future. Most of the things we think of today as hard, practical, and even indispensable were once merely dreams.
So I like to hope that the world need not be a dog-eat-dog jungle. I don’t think I’m my brother’s keeper. But I do think I’m obligated to be his helper. And that he has the same obligation to me.
In the last analysis, the entire pattern of my life and belief can be found in the words “do NOT do unto others that which you would NOT have others do unto you.” To say “Do unto others as you would have others DO unto you” somehow implies bargaining, an offer of favor for favor. But to restrain from acts which you, yourself, would abhor is an exercise in will power that must raise the level of human relationship.
“What is unpleasant to thyself,” says Hillel, “THAT do NOT unto thy neighbor. This is the whole law,” and he concluded, “All else is exposition.”
高考勵志英語美文:Keep the Innocent Eye
By Sir Hugh Casson
When I Accepted the invitation to join in "This I Believe," it was not-goodness knows-because I felt I had anything profound to contribute. I regarded it-selfishly, perhaps-as a chance to get my own ideas straight. I started, because it seemed simplest that way, with my own profession. The signposts I try to follow as an architect are these: to keep the innocent eye with which we are all born, and therefore always to be astonished; to respect the scholar but not the style snob; to like what I like without humbug, but also to train my eye and mind so that I can say why I like it; to use my head but not to be frightened to listen to my heart for there are some things which can be learned only through emotion; finally, to develop to the best of my ability the best that lies within me.
But what, you may say, about the really big problems of life- Religion? Politics? World Affairs? Well, to be honest, these great problems do not weigh heavily upon my mind. I have always cared more for the small simplicities of life-family affection, loyalty of friends, joy in creative work.
Religion? Well, when challenged I describe myself as "Church of England," and as a child I went regularly to church. But today, though I respect churchgoing as an act of piety and enjoy its sidelines, so to speak, the music and the architecture, it holds no significance for me. Perhaps, I don't know, it is the atmosphere of death in which religion is so steeped that has discouraged me-the graveyards, the parsonical voice, the thin damp smell of stone. Even today a "holy" face conjures up not saintliness but moroseness. So, most of what I learned of Christian morality I think I really learned indirectly at home and from friends.
World Affairs? I wonder if some of you remember a famous prewar cartoon. It depicted a crocodile emerging from a peace conference and announcing to a huge flock of sheep labeled "People of the World", "I am so sorry we have failed. We have been unable to restrain your warlike ambitions." Frankly, I feel at home with those sheep-mild, benevolent, rather apprehensive creatures, acting together by instinct and of course very, very woolly. But I have learned too, I think, that there is still no force, not even Christianity, so strong as patriotism; that the instinctive wisdom with which we all act in moments of crisis-that queer code of conduct which is understood by all but never formulated-is a better guide than any panel of professors; and finally that it is the inferiority complex, usually the result of an unhappy or unlucky home, which is at the bottom of nearly all our troubles. Is the solution, then, no more than to see that every child has a happy home? I'm not sure that it isn't. Children are nearer truth than we are. They have the innocent eye.
If you think that such a philosophy of life is superficial or tiresomely homespun or irresponsible, I will remind you in reply that the title of this series is "This I Believe”-not "This I ought to believe," nor even "This I would like to believe”-but, "This I Believe."
高考勵志英語美文:Flotsam, Jetsam, and Liberty
By James Carey
Perhaps more than anything else in the world, I believe in liberty: liberty for myself, liberty for my fellow men. I cannot forget the legend engraved on the base of the Statue of Liberty on Bedlows Island in New York Harbor: Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless tempest tossed to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door. That is the voice of America.
As one small part of it, one tiny decibel in its sound, I, as a free individual of America, believe in it. It makes no boast of noble ancestry. On the contrary, it admits honestly that each of us in this country, with a possible and qualified exception of our native Indians, is a displaced person. In a particular kind of way, the Indian was our first displaced person. If you and I did not come from abroad ourselves, our forefathers did. The scores that drove them was economic, political, or religious oppression.
Oppression has always strewn the shores of life with wretched human refuse. We who today are the proud people of a proud country are what might be called the reclaimed refuse of other lands. The fact that the flotsam and the jetsam, the persecuted and the pursued of all these other lands, the fact that they came here and, for the most part, successfully started life anew, this renews my faith in the resilience of a human individual and the dignity of man.
There are those who say we should be content with the material benefits we have accrued among ourselves. I cannot accept that for myself. A laboring man needs bread and butter, and cash to pay the rent. But he would be a poor individual, indeed, if he were not able to furnish the vestibule of his mind and his soul with spiritual embellishments beyond the price of a union contract.
I mean by this that I believe it is important for a man to discover, whether he is an electrical worker or an executive, that he is an individual with his own resources and a sense of the dignity of his own person and that of other men. We are separate. We are collective. Man can be strong alone but not indomitable, in isolation. He has to belong to something, to realize he is not created separately or apart from the rest of mankind, whether he is an American or a Mohammedan.
I am stirred by the abundance of the fields, the forest, the streams, and the natural resources they hold. But do these things make me important? Have we wrought the miracle of America because of these riches we hold? I say, no. Our strength—and I can say my strength, too, because I am a part of this whole—lies in a fundamental belief in the validity of human rights. And I believe that a man who holds these rights in proper esteem is greater, whether he is recognized or not.
As an individual, I must face the future with honesty and faith, in the goods things that have made us mighty. I must have confidence in myself, in others, and all men of goodwill everywhere, for freedom is the child of truth and confidence.
高三勵志英語美文摘抄