心靈雞湯英語小故事閱讀

  自改革開放以來,我國對外交流逐漸密切,因此社會各界對於英語的重視程度也與日俱增,在大學階段的英語教學過程中對於基礎知識和語法使用的內容比例大範圍下降,而增加了實用英語的內容。下面是小編帶來的,歡迎閱讀!

  篇一

  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.

  篇二

  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.”

  篇三

  A Ball to Roll Around

  By Robert Allman

  I lost my sight when I was 4 years old by falling off a boxcar in a freight yard in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and landing on my head. Now, I am 32. I can vaguely remember the brightness of sunshine and what color red is. It would be wonderful to see again. But a calamity can do strange things to people.

  It occurred to me the other day that I might not have come to love life so, as I do, if I hadn’t been blind. I believe in life now. I am not so sure that I would have believed in it so deeply, otherwise. I don’t mean that I would prefer to go without my eyes. I simply mean that the loss of them made me more appreciate what I had left.

  Life, I believe, asks a continuous series of adjustments to reality. The more readily a person is able to make these adjustments, the more meaningful his own private world becomes. The adjustment is never easy. I was bewildered and afraid, but I was lucky. My parents and my teachers saw something in me—oh, a potential to live you might call it—which I didn’t see. And they made me want to fight it out with blindness.

  The hardest lesson I had to learn was to believe in myself. That was basic. If I hadn’t been able to do that, I would have collapsed and become a chair rocker on the front porch for the rest of my life. When I say believe in myself, I am not talking about simply the kind of self-confidence that helps me down an unfamiliar staircase alone. That is part of it, but I mean something bigger than that: an assurance that I am, despite imperfections, a real, positive person; that somewhere in the sweeping, intricate, pattern of people, there is a special place where I can make myself fit. It took me years to discover and strengthen this assurance. It had to start with the most elementary things.

  When I was a youngster, once a man gave me an indoor baseball. I thought he was mocking me, and I was hurt.

  “I can’t use this,” I said.

  “Take it with you, “ he urged me, “and roll it around.”

  The words stuck in my head: “Roll it around, roll it around.” By rolling the ball, I could listen where it went. This gave me an idea—how to achieve a goal I had thought impossible: playing baseball. At Philadelphia’s Overbrook School for the Blind, I invented a successful variation of baseball. We called it groundball.

  All my life, I have set ahead of me a series of goals, and then tried to reach them one at a time. I had to learn my limitations. It was no good to try for something I knew at the start was wildly out of reach, because that only invited the bitterness of failure. I would fail sometimes anyway, but on the average, I made progress.

  I believe I made progress more readily because of a pattern of life shaped by certain values. I find it easier to live with myself if I try to be honest. I find strength in the friendship and interdependence of people. I would be blind, indeed, without my sighted friends. And very humbly, I say that I have found purpose and comfort in a mortal’s ambition toward godliness.

  Perhaps a man without sight is blinded less by the importance of material things than other men are. All I know is that a belief in the higher existence of a nobility for men to strive for has been an inspiration that has helped me more than anything else to hold my life together.