每天英語美文欣賞
在非英語專業學生中開設英語美文賞析,可以培養學生欣賞、理解文學原著的能力,促進學生英語語言水平的提高,激發學生對語言文學的興趣。下面是小編帶來的每天經典英語美文欣賞，歡迎閱讀!
每天經典英語美文欣賞篇一
How to Give Your Money Away
By Dr. Samuel Best
Many years ago I met a man whose unique psychology helped me to shed a life of struggle and uneasiness for great happiness, for peace of mind, and for a measure of success I otherwise would not have attained.
His name was George Robert White, a man who was orphaned and impoverished at a tender age. Yet, a man whose God-given beliefs made him both a material and a spiritual millionaire at thirty.
My path to success, and to what I had considered its natural result- happiness-was the ordinary road over which most American businessmen travel, namely, endless hours of hard work, social contacts, wise investments, headaches and heartaches.
To be sure, in a materialistic sense, I had traveled a long way from my father’s farm in Nova Scotia. I had become an executive in a multi-million dollar drug firm. But where was the resulting happiness that my material gain was supposed to have afforded me?
In my private moments of mental inventory, I discovered that I had no more peace of mind, nor was I less afraid of the problems of life and death, than many years before, when I planned my road to happiness and success by the flickering lamp in my father's tiny farmhouse. The reason was, I had neglected spiritual values in my anxiety for material gain.
It took the kindly advice of George Robert White, to open the pathway for me to happiness and freedom of mind. The important lesson Mr. White taught me is this: If we are to be happy, if we are to be successful in every aspect of the word, if we are to live truly full lives, we must share ourselves, as well as our material gain, with our fellow men.
As a young man, Mr. White took over the leadership of a small soap-manufacturing plant in Boston, and throughout his career he gave away to charity a large part of his net profits.
Yet, despite his unusual business practices, Mr. White built that tiny concern into the world-famous Cuticura Corporation, and became the multi-million-dollar manufacturer of Cuticura Soap, Ointment and Shampoo.
I shall never forget Mr. White's words: "Personal success, business success, built upon materialism alone, are empty shells concealing disappointment, saddened lives," which he epitomized by saying: "Cast your bread upon the waters and it will come back in abundance."
Since Mr. White's death, I have endeavored, as his successor, to adhere to his code of ethics. Two dollars out of every three dollars profit earned by our corporation is shared with others in helping to make our nation a better place in which to live.
We, in our corporation, believe that it is not sufficient only to manufacture as fine a product as is possible-millions of dollars over the years are being shared by our corporation for the advancement of medicine and science, for chemical research, for art and for beauty.
In my personal life I have adopted Mr. White's beliefs, and, in doing so, I have become much better equipped to serve humanity.
My reward, my blessings, have come to me in the form of personal satisfaction and peace of mind that had been substantially foreign to me.
Yes, I believe that spirituality is the needed seasoning to America's materialism. But it must be that kind of spirituality that takes the form of help and service toward our fellow men.
每天經典英語美文欣賞篇二
About Secrets and Falling Tiles
By Carroll Binder
“We are all at the mercy of a falling tile,” Julius Caesar reminds us in Thornton Wilder’s Ides of March. None of us knows at what hour something we may love may suffer some terrible blow by a force we can neither anticipate nor control.
Fifty-five years of living, much of the time in trouble centers of a highly troubled era, have not taught me how to avoid being hit by falling tiles. I have sustained some very severe blows. My mother died when I was three years old. My first-born son, a gifted and idealistic youth, was killed in the war. While I was still cherishing the hope that he might be alive, circumstances beyond my control made it impossible for me to continue work into which I had poured my heart’s blood for twenty years.
I speak of such things here in the hope of helping others to believe with me that there are resources within one’s grasp which enable one to sustain such blows without being crushed or embittered by them.
I believe the best hope of standing up to falling tiles is through developing a sustaining philosophy and state of mind all through life. I have seen all sorts of people sustain all sorts of blows in all sorts of circumstances by all sorts of faiths, so I believe anyone can find a faith that will serve his needs if he persists in the quest.
One of the best ways I know of fortifying oneself to withstand the vicissitudes of this insecure and unpredictable era is to school oneself to require relatively little in the way of material possessions, physical satisfactions, or the praise of others. The less one requires of such things the better situated one is to stand up to changes of fortune.
I am singularly rich in friendships. Friends of all ages have contributed enormously to my happiness and helped me greatly in times of need. I learned one of the great secrets of friendship early in life—to regard each person with whom one associates as an end in himself, not a means to one’s own ends. That entails trying to help those with whom one comes in contact to find fulfillment in their own way while seeking one’s own fulfillment in one’s own way.
Another ethical principle that has stood me in good stead is: Know thyself! I try to acquaint myself realistically with my possibilities and limitations. I try to suit my aspirations to goals within my probably capacity to attain. I may have missed some undiscovered possibilities fro growth, but I have spared myself much by not shooting for stars it clearly was not given me to attain.
I have seen much inhumanity, cheating, corruption, sordidness, and selfishness but I have not become cynical. I have seen too much that is decent, kind, and noble in me to lose faith in the possibility for a far finer existence than yet has been achieved. I believe the quest for a better life is the most satisfying pursuit of men and nations.
I love life, but I am not worried about death. I do not feel that I have lost my son and a host of others dear to me by death. I believe with William Penn that “they that love beyond the world cannot be separated by it. Death is but crossing the world, as friends do the seas; they live in one another still.” Death, I believe, teaches us the things of deathlessness.
每天經典英語美文欣賞篇三
What Are People Good For?
By Ina Corinne Brown
One's beliefs are revealed not so much in words or in formal creeds as in the assumptions on which one habitually acts and in the basic values by which all choices are tested.
The cornerstone of my own value system was laid in childhood with parents who believed that personal integrity came first. They never asked, ”What will people think?” The question was,“What will you think of yourself, if you do this or fail to do that?” Thus, living up to one’s own conception of one’s self became a basic value, and the question, “What will people think,” took a subordinate place.
A second basic value, in some ways an extension of the first, I owe to an old college professor, who had suffered more than his share of grief and trouble. Over and over he said to us, “The one thing that really matters is to be bigger than the things that can happen to you. Nothing that can happen to you is half so important that the way in which you end it.”
Gradually I realized that here was the basis of the only really security and peace of mind that a human being can have. Nobody can be sure when disaster, disappointment, injustice, or humiliation, may come to him through no fault of his own. Nor can one be guaranteed against one’s own mistakes and failures. But the way we meet life is ours to choose. And when integrity, fortitude, dignity, and compassion are our choice, the things that can happen to us lose their power over us.
The acceptance of these two basic values led to a third. If what one is and how one meets life are of first importance, one is not impressed by another's money, status, or power, nor does one judge people by their race, color, or social position. This opens up a whole new world of relationships, for when friendships are based on qualities of mind and character, one can have friends among old and young, rich and poor, famous and unknown, educated and unlettered, and among people of all races and all nations.
Given these three basic values, a fourth became inevitable. It is one's duty and obligation to help create a social order in which persons are more important than things, ideas more precious than gadgets, and in which individuals are judged on the basis of personal worth. Moreover, for this judgment to be fair, human beings must have an opportunity for the fullest development of which they are capable. One is thus led to work for a world of freedom and justice through those social agencies and institutions which make it possible for people everywhere to realize their highest potentialities.
Perhaps all this adds up to a belief in what has been called the human use of human beings. We are set off from the rest of the animal world by our capacity consciously to transcend our physical needs and desires. Men must concern themselves with food and with other physical needs, and they must protect themselves and their own from bodily harm, but these activities are not exclusively human. Many animals concern themselves with these things. When we worship, pray, or feel compassion, when we enjoy a painting, a sunset or a sonata, when we think and reason, pursue ideas, seek truth, or read a book, when we protect the weak and helpless, when we honor the noble and cherish the good, when we cooperate with our fellow men to build a better world, our behavior is worthy of our status as human beings.