英语美文温馨夜读3篇
英语语言如同汉语一样,是世界上最优美的语言之一,蕴含着浓厚的人文功能和美学价值。下面是本站小编带来的英语美文温馨夜读，欢迎阅读!
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.
英语美文温馨夜读篇二Freedom is Worth the Risk
The philosopher George Santayana, at the age of eighty-eight, admitted that things no longer seemed so simple to him as they did fifty years ago. Even those of use who have not reached Mr. Santayana’s age must share that feeling; but we must act by the best light we have, hoping that the light will grow brighter- and we have reason to hope it will, so long as men remain free to think. The most important thing in the world, I believe, is the freedom of the mind. All progress, and all other freedoms, spring from that. It is a dangerous freedom, but this is a dangerous world. You cannot think right without running the risk of thinking wrong; but for any evils that may come from thinking, the cure is more thinking. Over much of the world, at present, the freedom of the mind is suppressed. We have got to preserve it here, despite the efforts of very earnest men to suppress it—men who say, and perhaps believe, that they are actuated by patriotism, but who are doing their best to destroy the liberties which above all are what the United States of America has meant, to its people and to humanity.
This is perhaps a less personal statement than most of those in “ This I believe”. If so, it is because a man of my age, in his relation to himself, runs mostly on momentum; and it is a little difficult to look back and figure out what give him the push, or the various pushes. What he has to consider now is what he can contribute to the present, or the future, as a member of a very peculiar species—possibly even a unique species—which has immense capacities for both good and evil, as it has amply demonstrated during its recorded history. That history to date is ---barring some unpredictable cosmic disaster---the barest beginning of what may lie ahead of us. But we happen to live in one of the turning points of history—by no means the first, as it will not be the last; and the future of mankind will be more than usually affected by what we do in this generation.
What should we do? Well, first of all and above all, preserve freedom, and extend it if we can. Beyond that I don’t know how better to define our business than to say we should try to promote an increase of decency. Decency in the sense of respect for other people; of taking no advantage; of never saying,” This man must be miserable in order that I may be comfortable.” This is not as easy as it looks; it’s impossible to exist without hurting somebody, however unintentionally. But there are limits. I do not believe that human life is accurately represented by Viggeland’s famous sculptured column in Oslo, of people climbing over one another and trampling one anther down. The Nazis, when they occupied Norway, greatly admired that sculpture. They would. But the rest of us can do better than that; many men and women in every age have done better, and are doing it still.
The Scottish scientist ane once said that the people who can make a positive contribution to human progress are few; that most of us have to be satisfied with merely staving off the inroads of chaos. That is a hard enough job—especially in these times, when those inroads are more threatening that they have been for a long time past. But if we can stave them off, and keep the field clear for the creative intelligence, we can feel that we have done our part toward helping the human race get ahead.
英语美文温馨夜读篇三What Makes Me Feel Big
by J. Frank Dobie
"My mind is big when I look at you and talk to you," Chief Eagle of the Pawnees said to George Bird Grinnell when, after years of absence, that noble writer appeared at his friend's tepee.
It is very difficult in drawing up a credo to be severely honest about oneself, to avoid all traditional cant. We actually believe in what we value most. Outside of the realms of ccarnality and property, which men appearing in public generally pretend not to notice, I believe in and draw nourishment from whatever makes me "feel big".
I believe in a Supreme Power, unknowable and impersonal, whose handiwork the soul-enlarging firmament declares. However, I believe in questionings, doubtings, searchings, skepticism, and I discredit credulity or blind faith. The progress of man is based on disbelief of the commonly accepted. The noblest minds and natures of human history have thought and sung, lived and died, trying to budge the status quo towards a larger and fuller status. I am sustained by a belief in evolution - the increasing purpose of life in which the rational is, with geological slowness, evolving out of the irrational. To believe that goodness and wisdom and righteousness, in Garden of Eden perfection, lie somewhere far ahead instead of farther and farther behind, gives me hope and somewhat explains existence. This is a long view. I do not pretend that it is a view always present in me. It does raise me when I have it, however.
I feel no resentment so strongly as that against forces which make men and women afraid to speak out forthrightly. The noblest satisfaction I have is in witnessing the up movement of suppressed individuals and people. I make no pretense to having rid myself freed from certain prejudices, but at times when I have discovered myself freed from certain prejudices, I have felt rare exhilaration.
For me, the beautiful resides in the physical, but it is spiritual. I have never heard a sermon as spiritual in either phrase or fact us, "Waters on a starry night are beautiful and free." No hymn lifts my heart higher than the morning call of the bobwhite to the long fluting cry of sandhill cranes out of the sky at dusk. I have never smelled incense in a church as refining to the spirit as a spring breeze laden with aroma from a field of bluebonnets. Not all hard truths are beautiful, but "beauty is truth." It incorporates love and is incorporated by love. It is the goal of all great art. Its presence everywhere makes it free to all. It is not so abstract as justice, but beauty and intellectual freedom and justice, all incorporating truth and goodness, are constant sustainers to my mind and spirit.
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