英语标准美文100篇 001 Saving money for College on My Own作者：struggle 来源：人人听力网时间：09-01-06 [提示：]双击单词，即可查看词义!(QQ群：55611196(严禁加多个群，进群看公告))
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Finally, I entered the institution. Because of my careful savings, I did not have to work during the school year. Then, summer came and it was time to work harder than ever. I continued working as a waitress at night, instructed tennis camps several mornings a week and worked as a secretary for a few hours in the afternoons. Being a little overzealous, I also decided to take a class at a community college. This class at the community college saved me $650. it was an exhausting summer and made me anxious to return to my relatively easy life at college.
During my second and third years of undergraduate schooling, I decided to work about five hours per week in the campus admissions office answering phones. This provided a little spending money and kept me from draining my savings. The overall situation looked hopeful as I approached my senior year as long as I could make as much money as I had the previous summer. I wanted to go to Israel to study for 3 weeks, but I hesitated in making this decision because it would cost me $1,600 more to get the credits in Israel. About two weeks later my Mom called to tell me that I had $1,600 in the bank that I had forgotten about! One of my concerns about this trip was not only the cost, but the loss of time to make money; however, I made as much that summer in the ten weeks when I was at home as I had made during the fourteen weeks when I was at home the summer before. The way everything worked together to make this trip feasible was one of the most exciting things that have ever happened to me.
This experience has shaped me in many important ways. The first thing that I learned was the importance of a strong work ethic. Working long hours did a lot to mold my character and helped me learn the value of a dollar. It also made me learn how to craft creative solutions to difficult dilemmas.
Whenever I am overwhelmed or afraid of the future, I can remember my $64,268 miracle.
Passage 2
Competition
It is a plain fact that we are in a world where competition is going on in all areas and at all levels.This is exciting.Yet, on the other hand, competition breeze a pragmatic attitude.People choose to learn things that are useful,and do things that are profitable.Todays' college education is also affected by this general sense of utilitarianism. Many college students choose business nor
computing programming as their majors convinced that this professions are where the big money is. It is not unusual to see the college students taking a part time jobs as a warming up for the real battle.I often see my friends taking GRE tests, working on English or computer certificates and taking the driving licence to get a licence. Well, I have nothing against being practical. As the competition in the job market gets more and more intense, students do have reasons to be practical. However, we should never forget that college education is much more than skill training. Just imagine, if your utilitarianism is prevails on campus, living no space for the cultivation of students' minds,or nurturing of their soul. We will see university is training out well trained spiritless working machines.If utilitarianism prevails society, we will see people bond by mind-forged medicals lost in the money-making ventures;we will see humalitylossing their grace and dignity, and that would be disastrous.I'd like to think society as a courage and people persumed for profit or fame as a horese that pulls the courage.Yet without the driver picking direction the courage would go straight and may even end out in a precarious situation .A certificate may give you some advantage, but broad horizons, positive attitudes and personal integrities ,these are assets you cannot acquire through any quick fixed way.In today's world, whether highest level of competition is not of skills or expertise , but vision and strategy. Your intellectual quality largely determinds how far you can go in your career.
college students' idols
Successful entrepreneurs have surpassed pop stars as college students' idols, a recent Fudan University survey has found.
In the survey, which sampled 150 students from different grades and departments, 96 chose successful entrepreneurs as their idols, 91 added scientists and scholars to the list, while only some 75 opted for stars of stage and screen.
The results toppled the old perception that young college students are most impressed by the stars of shows.
Fudan's students seemed not to be influenced too much by popular TV shows and new stars, despite the latest Supergirl, Shang Wenjie having graduated from the university last year.
"It's normal for students to have traditional ideas about the qualities an idol should have. They think of idols as people who have made a great contribution to society. These kinds of ideas aren't easily changed by TV shows," said Zhen Zhiwei, a second-year post-graduate student who conducted the survey.
But students do have new standards for selecting idols. Some students voted for ordinary people and even fictional characters, such as Harry Potter.
"It reveals the diversity of students' standards," Zhen said. "Under the influence of pop culture, some students now view fictional figures as their idols. They see the same qualities in those fictional figures as in other real people.
"We are also delighted to see that more and more students are concerned with the roles ordinary people play in society. Wealth, social status and fame are not the only standards they use to select idols."
The survey also revealed that 57% college students do not want to be idols for others.
"The result can be regarded as a good illustration for why most of them choose successful entrepreneurs and scholars as their idols," said Zhen. "They have high expectations for idols, so they believe that to be an idol means having to take on more responsibilities and pressure than other people, and they are not ready to take so much responsibility yet."
第二篇：晨读英语美文100篇(六级)
星火书业 晨读英语美文100篇六级
目录
1 Knowledge and Virtue 知识与美德 2．“Packaging” a Person 人的包装 3．Three Passions l Have Lived for 吾之三愿 4．A Little Girl 小女孩儿 5．Declaration of Independence 独立宣言 6．A Tribute to the Dog 狗的赞歌 7．Knowledge and Progress 知识和进步 8．Address by Engels 恩格斯：在马克斯墓前的讲话
9．Relationship that Lasts 永远的关系 10．Rush 匆匆 11．A Summer Day 夏El 12．Night 夜色 13．Peace and Development：the Themes of Our Times 和平与发展：时代的主题 14．Self．Esteem 自尊无价 15．Struggle for Freedom 为自由而斗争 16．Passing on Small Change 把零钱传递下去 17．The Props to Help Man Endure(I) 人类生存的支柱(一) 18．The Props to Help Man Endure(I1) 人类生存的支柱(二) 19．What Is Immortal 何为不朽
20．Suppose Someone Gave You a Pen 假如给你一支笔 21．Two Ways of Thinking of History 思考历史的两种方式 22．On the Feeling of Immortality in Youth 有感于青春长在 23．Of Studies 论读书 24．Of Media 如何看待媒体 25．HOW to Be True to Yourself 怎样对自己诚实 26．Five Balls of Life 生命中的五个球 27．The Road to Success 成功之道 28．A Divided House Cannot Stand 家不和．则不立 29．Alone Again，Naturally 享受孤独 30．The Blue Days 忧郁的日子 31．Choose Optimism 选择乐观 32．Why Should We
Live with Such Hurry? 为什么我们要活得如此匆忙? 33．A Woman’s Tears 女人的眼泪 34．Laziness 1赖惰 35．Owning Books 论藏书
36．Olympic Games 奥运会 37．Life Lessons 生活的教训 38．Rain of Seattle(I) 西雅图之雨(一) 39．Rain of SeattIe(II) 西雅图之雨(二)
40．Snow Season 雪季 41．The 50-Percent Theory of Life 生活的对半理论 42．The Road to Happiness 幸福之道 43．Two Views of the River 大河的两种景色 44．How Germans See Others 德国人如何看待别国人 45．Napoleon to Josephine 拿破仑致约瑟芬的信
46．When Heaven and Earth Kiss 当大地接受天堂之吻
47．Disrupting My Comfort Zone 不要安于现状 48．The One Way to Become an Artist 成为艺术家的唯一之路 49．Book and Life 书与人生 50．Snow and the Passage of Time 冬日遄思 5 1 Sorrows of the Millionaire 百万富翁的悲哀 52．Address at Gettysburg 葛底斯堡演说辞 53．Choosing an Occupation 选择职业 54．Dining Etiquette when Dating 用餐礼仪 55．Stress and Relaxation 压力与松弛
56．The Reasons We Fight over Finance 我们为什么为钱争吵
57．Washington’S Address to His Troops 乔治?华盛顿对部队的演说 58．Adolescence 青春期 59．Work 工作 60．Benjamin Franklin 本杰明?富兰克林 61．It’S Never Too Late to Change 改变自我无时限 62．The Price of Perfection 尽善尽美的代价 63．The Definition of a Gentteman 何谓君子 64．Mirror Mirror―What Do I See? 镜子，镜子――我看到了什么? 65．Tomorrow Will Be a Better Day 明
天会更好” 66．The Kindness of Strangers 陌生人的善意 67．The Pain of Youth (I) 年少时的痛苦(一) 68．The Pain of Youth(II) 年少时的痛苦(二) 69．Failure Is a Gcod Thing 失败使人受益
70．Inaugural Speech 就职演讲 71．Beauty Is Meaningless 美是难以言传的 72．The Year of Wandering 徘徊的岁月 73．Wake up Your Life 唤醒你的生活 74．Wild Flowers 野花 75．The Bread of Life 人的精神食粮 76．An October Sunrise 十月的日出 77．The Fascinating Moonrise 月升魅无穷 78．Human Thought Grows Like a Tree 人类的思想如一棵树般成长 79．Learn to Live in the Present Moment 学会在现实中生活 80．Success Is a Choice 成功是一种选择 81．My Declaration of Self-Esteem 我的成长宣言 82．Youth 青春 83．Why I Want a Wife 为什么我想要个妻子 84．The Modern PIato 现代柏拉图 85．A Grain of Sand 一粒沙 86．Three Days to See 假若给我三天光明 87．Motherly and Fatherly Love 母爱和父爱
88．Ambition 雄心 89．Stress Prevention 拒绝压力 90．OId Friends．Good Friends 老朋友，好朋友 91．What Every Writer Wants 作家之所需 92．Waves 海浪 93．Nonviolent and Noncooperation Movements 非暴力不合作运动 94．We Walk on the Moon 我们在月球上散步了 95．Searching for a Win-Win Solution 寻求两全其美之道 96．A Word for Autumn 秋之小语 97．The Folly of Anxiety 忧虑之愚 98．On Going a Journey 论出游 99．Blood，Toil，Sweat and Tears 热血、辛劳、汗水和眼泪 100．My Perfect
House 我的完美之家
Passage 1. knowledge and Virtue
Knowledge is one thing, virtue is another;
good sense is not conscience, refinement is not humility,
nor is largeness and justness of view faith.
Philosophy, however enlightened, however profound,
gives no command over the passions, no influential motives, no vivifying principles.
Liberal Education makes not the Christian, not the Catholic, but the gentleman.
It is well to be a gentleman,
it is well to have a cultivated intellect, a delicate taste,
a candid, equitable, dispassionate mind,
a noble and courteous bearing in the conduct of life
—these are the connatural qualities of a large knowledge;
they are the objects of a University.
I am advocating, I shall illustrate and insist upon them;
but still, I repeat, they are no guarantee for sanctity or even for conscientiousness,
and they may attach to the man of the world, to the profligate,
to the heartless, pleasant, alas, and attractive as he shows when decked
out in them.
Taken by themselves, they do but seem to be what they are not;
they look like virtue at a distance, but they are detected by close observers, and in the long run;
and hence it is that they are popularly accused of pretense and hypocrisy, not, I repeat, from their own fault,
but because their professors and their admirers persist in taking them for what they are not,
and are officious in arrogating for them a praise to which they have no claim.
Quarry the granite rock with razors, or moor the vessel with a thread of silk,
then may you hope with such keen and delicate instruments as human knowledge
and human reason to contend against those giants,
Passage 2. “Packing” a Person
A person, like a commodity, needs packaging.
But going too far is absolutely undesirable.
A little exaggeration, however, does no harm
when it shows the person's unique qualities to their advantage. To display personal charm in a casual and natural way,
it is important for one to have a clear knowledge of oneself.
A master packager knows how to integrate art and nature without any traces of embellishment,
so that the person so packaged is no commodity but a human being, lively and lovely.
A young person, especially a female, radiant with beauty and full of life, has all the favor granted by God.
Any attempt to make up would be self-defeating.
Youth, however, comes and goes in a moment of doze.
Packaging for the middle-aged is primarily to conceal the furrows ploughed by time.
If you still enjoy life's exuberance enough to retain self-confidence and pursue pioneering work, you are unique in your natural qualities, and your charm and grace will remain.
Elderly people are beautiful if their river of life has been,
through plains, mountains and jungles, running its course as it should. You have really lived your life which now arrives at a complacent stage of serenity
indifferent to fame or wealth.
There is no need to resort to hair-dyeing；
the snow-capped mountain is itself a beautiful scene of fairyland.
Let your looks change from young to old synchronizing with the natural
ageing process
so as to keep in harmony with nature, for harmony itself is beauty, while the other way round will only end in unpleasantness.
To be in the elder's company is like reading a thick book of deluxe edition that fascinates one so much as to be reluctant to part with.
As long as one finds where one stands, one knows how to package oneself,
just as a commodity establishes its brand by the right packaging. Passage 3. Three Passions I Have Lived for
Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life:
the longing for love, the search for knowledge,
and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.
These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course over a deep ocean of anguish,
reaching to the very verge of despair.
I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy
—ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of my life for a few hours for this joy.
I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness
—that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness
looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it, finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature,
the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what—at last—I have found.
With equal passion I have sought knowledge.
I have wished to understand the hearts of men.
I have wished to know why the stars shine ...
A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.
Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens.
But always pity brought me back to earth.
Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart.
Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people —a hated burden to their sons,
and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be.
I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.
This has been my life.
I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again
if the chance were offered me.
Passage 4. A Little Girl
Sitting on a grassy grave, beneath one of the windows of the church, was a little girl.
With her head bent back she was gazing up at the sky and singing, while one of her little hands was pointing to a tiny cloud
that hovered like a golden feather above her head.
The sun, which had suddenly become very bright, shining on her glossy hair,
gave it a metallic luster, and it was difficult to say what was the color, dark bronze or black.
So completely absorbed was she in watching the cloud to which her strange song or incantation seemed addressed,
that she did not observe me when I rose and went towards her. Over her head, high up in the blue,
a lark that was soaring towards the same gauzy cloud was singing, as if in rivalry.
As I slowly approached the child,
I could see by her forehead, which in the sunshine seemed like a globe of pearl,
and especially by her complexion, that she uncommonly lovely. Her eyes, which at one moment seemed blue-gray, at another violet,
were shaded by long black lashes, curving backward in a most peculiar
way,
and these matched in hue her eyebrows,
and the tresses that were tossed about her tender throat were quivering in the sunlight.
All this I did not take in at once;
for at first I could see nothing but those quivering, glittering, changeful eyes turned up into my face.
Gradually the other features, especially the sensitive full-lipped mouth, grew upon me as I stood silently gazing.
Here seemed to me a more perfect beauty than had ever come to me in my loveliest dreams of beauty.
Yet it was not her beauty so much as the look she gave me that fascinated me, melted me.
Passage 5 Declaration of Independence
When in the Course of human events,
it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another,
and to assume among the powers of the earth,
the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them,
a decent respect to the opinions of mankind
requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,
—That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends,
it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it,
and to institute new Government,
laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form,
as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes;
and accordingly all experience has shown,
that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable,
than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.
But when a long train of abuses and usurpations,
pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them
under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty,
to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
—Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies;
and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government.
is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations,
all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.
To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.
Passage 6. A Tribute to the Dog
The best friend a man has in the world may turn against him and become his enemy.
His son or daughter that he has reared with loving care may prove ungrateful.
Those who are nearest and dearest to us,
those whom we trust with our happiness and our good name,
may become traitors to their faith.
The money that a man has he may lose.
It flies away from him, perhaps when he needs it most.
A man?s reputation may be sacrificed in a moment of ill-considered action.
The people who are prone to fall on their knees to do us honor when success is with us
may be the first to throw the stone of malice when failure settles its cloud upon our heads.
The one absolutely unselfish friend that man can have in this selfish world,
the one that never deserts him,
the one that never proves ungrateful or treacherous, is his dog.
A man?s dog stands by him in prosperity and in poverty, in health and in sickness.
He will sleep on the cold ground, where the wintry winds blow and the snow drives fiercely,
if only he may be near his master?s side.
He will kiss the hand that has no food to offer;
he will lick the wounds and sores that come from encounter with the roughness of the world.
He will guard the sleep of his pauper master as if he were a prince. When all other friends desert, he remains.
When riches take wings and reputation falls to pieces,
he is as constant in his love as the sun in its journeys through the heavens.
If fortune drives the master forth, an outcast in the world, friendless and homeless,
the faithful dog asks no higher privilege than that of accompanying him, to guard him against danger, to fight against his enemies.
And when the last scene of all comes, and death takes the master in its embrace,
and his body is laid away in the cold ground,
no matter if all other friends pursue their way,
there by the grave will the noble dog be found,
his head between his paws, his eyes sad but open in alert watchfulness, faithful and true even in death.
Passage 7. Knowledge and Progress
Why does the idea of progress loom so large in the modern world?
Surely because progress of a particular kind is actually taking place around us
and is becoming more and more manifest.
Although mankind has undergone no general improvement in intelligence or morality,
it has made extraordinary progress in the accumulation of knowledge. Knowledge began to increase as soon as the thoughts of one individual could be communicated to another by means of speech.
With the invention of writing， a great advance was made,
for knowledge could then be not only communicated but also stored.
Libraries made education possible, and education in its turn added to libraries:
the growth of knowledge followed a kind of compound interest law, which was greatly enhanced by the invention of printing.
All this was comparatively slow until, with the coming of science, the tempo was suddenly raised.
Then knowledge began to be accumulated according to a systematic plan. The trickle became a stream;
the stream has now become a torrent.
Moreover, as soon as new knowledge is acquired, it is now turned to practical account.
What is called “modern civilization” is not the result of a balanced development of all man's nature,
but of accumulated knowledge applied to practical life.
The problem now facing humanity is:
What is going to be done with all this knowledge?
As is so often pointed out, knowledge is a two-edged weapon
which can be used equally for good or evil.
It is now being used indifferently for both.
Could any spectacle, for instance, be more grimly weird
than that of gunners using science to shatter men's bodies while, close at hand,
surgeons use it to restore them?
We have to ask ourselves very seriously what will happen if this twofold use of knowledge,
with its ever-increasing power, continues.
Passage 8. Address by Engels
On the 14th of March, at a quarter to three in the afternoon,
the greatest living thinker ceased to think.
He had been left alone for scarcely two minutes,
and when we came back we found him in his armchair,
peacefully gone to sleep—but forever.
An immeasurable loss has been sustained both by the militant proletariat of Europe and America,
and by historical science, in the death of this man.
The gap that has been left by the departure of this mighty spirit will soon enough make itself felt.
Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing,
before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.;
that therefore the production of the immediate material means of subsistence
and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people
or during a given epoch form the foundation upon which the state institutions,
the legal conceptions, art, and even the ideas on religion,
of the people concerned have been evolved, and in the light of which they must, therefore,
be explained, instead of vice versa, as had hitherto been the case. But that is not all.
Marx also discovered the special law of motion governing the present-day capitalist mode of production
and the bourgeois society that this mode of production has created. The discovery of surplus value suddenly threw light on the problem, in trying to solve which all previous investigations,
of both bourgeois economists and socialist critics, had been groping in the dark.
Two such discoveries would be enough for one lifetime.
Happy the man to whom it is granted to make even one such discovery. But in every single field which Marx investigated—and he investigated
very many fields,
none of them superficially—in every field, even in that of mathematics, he made independent discoveries.
Passage 9. Relationship that Lasts
If somebody tells you,“ I?ll love you for ever,” will you believe it? I don?t think there?s any reason not to.
We are ready to believe such commitment at the moment,
whatever change may happen afterwards.
As for the belief in an everlasting love, that?s another thing.
Then you may be asked whether there is such a thing as an everlasting love.
I?d answer I believe in it, but an everlasting love is not immutable. You may unswervingly love or be loved by a person.
But love will change its composition with the passage of time. It will not remain the same.
In the course of your growth and as a result of your increased experience, love will become something different to you.
In the beginning you believed a fervent love for a person could last definitely.
By and by, however, “fervent” gave way to “prosaic”.
Precisely because of this change it became possible for love to last.
Then what was meant by an everlasting love would eventually end up in a sort of interdependence.
We used to insist on the difference between love and liking.
The former seemed much more beautiful than the latter.
One day, however, it turns out there?s really no need to make such difference.
Liking is actually a sort of love.
By the same token, the everlasting interdependence is actually an everlasting love.
I wish I could believe there was somebody who would love me for ever. That?s, as we all know, too romantic to be true.
Instead, it will more often than not be a case of lasting relationship. Passage 10. Rush
Swallows may have gone, but there is a time of return;
willow trees may have died back, but there is a time of regreening; peach blossoms may have fallen, but they will bloom again.
Now, you the wise, tell me, why should our days leave us, never to return?
If they had been stolen by someone, who could it be?
Where could he hide them?
If they had made the escape themselves, then where could they stay at the
moment?
I don?t know how many days I have been given to spend,
but I do feel my hands are getting empty.
Taking stock silently, I find that more than eight thousand days have already slid away from me.
Like a drop of water from the point of a needle disappearing into the ocean,
my days are dripping into the stream of time, soundless, traceless.
Already sweat is starting on my forehead, and tears welling up in my eyes.
Those that have gone have gone for good, those to come keep coming; yet in between, how fast is the shift, in such a rush?
When I get up in the morning,
the slanting sun marks its presence in my small room in two or three oblongs.
The sun has feet, look, he is treading on, lightly and furtively; and I am caught, blankly, in his revolution.
Thus — the day flows away through the sink when I wash my hands, wears off in the bowl when I eat my meal,
and passes away before my day-dreaming gaze as reflect in silence. I can feel his haste now, so I reach out my hands to hold him back, but he keeps flowing past my withholding hands.
In the evening, as I lie in bed, he strides over my body, glides past my feet, in his agile way.
The moment I open my eyes and meet the sun again, one whole day has gone.
I bury my face in my hands and heave a sigh.
But the new day begins to flash past in the sigh.
What can I do, in this bustling world, with my days flying in their escape? Nothing but to hesitate, to rush.
What have I been doing in that eight-thousand-day rush, apart from hesitating?
Those bygone days have been dispersed as smoke by a light wind, or evaporated as mist by the morning sun.
What traces have I left behind me?
Have I ever left behind any gossamer traces at all?
I have come to the world, stark naked;
am I to go back, in a blink, in the same stark nakedness?
It is not fair though:
why should I have made such a trip for nothing!
You the wise, tell me,
why should our days leave us, never to return?
Passage 11. A Summer Day
One day thirty years ago Marseilles lay in the burning sun.
A blazing sun upon a fierce August day was no greater rarity in southern France
than at any other time before or since.
Everything in Marseilles and about Marseilles had stared at the fervid sun,
and had been stared at in return, until a staring habit had become universal there.
Strangers were stared out of countenance by staring white houses,
staring white streets, staring tracts of arid road, staring hills from which verdure was burnt away.
The only things to be seen not fixedly staring and glaring
were the vines drooping under their loads of grapes.
These did occasionally wink a little, as the hot air barely moved their faint leaves.
The universal stare made the eyes ache.
Towards the distant blue of the Italian coast, indeed,
it was a little relieved by light clouds of mist
slowly rising from the evaporation of the sea,
but it softened nowhere else.
Far away the dusty vines overhanging wayside cottages,
and the monotonous wayside avenues of parched trees without shade, dropped beneath the stare of earth and sky.
So did the horses with drowsy bells, in long files of carts,
creeping slowly towards the interior;
so did their recumbent drivers, when they were awake, which rarely happened;
so did the exhausted laborers in the fields.
Everything that lived or grew was oppressed by the glare;
except the lizard, passing swiftly over rough stone walls,
and cicada, chirping its dry hot chirp, like a rattle.
The very dust was scorched brown,
and something quivered in the atmosphere as if the air itself were panting. Blinds, shutters, curtains, awnings, were all closed and drawn to deep out the stare.
Grant it but a chink or a keyhole,
and it shot in like a white-hot arrow.
Passage 12. Night
Night has fallen over the country.
Through the trees rises the red moon and the stars are scarcely seen. In the vast shadow of night, the coolness and the dews descend.
I sit at the open window to enjoy them; and hear only the voice of the summer wind.
Like black hulks, the shadows of the great trees ride at anchor on the billowy sea of grass.
I cannot see the red and blue flowers, but I know that they are there. Far away in the meadow gleams the silver Charles.
The tramp of horses' hoofs sounds from the wooden bridge.
Then all is still save the continuous wind or the sound of the neighboring sea.
The village clock strikes; and I feel that I am not alone.
How different it is in the city!
It is late, and the crowd is gone.
You step out upon the balcony, and lie in the very bosom of the cool, dewy night as if you folded her garments about you.
Beneath lies the public walk with trees, like a fathomless, black gulf. The lamps are still burning up and down the long street.
People go by with grotesque shadows, now foreshortened,
and now lengthening away into the darkness and vanishing,
while a new one springs up behind the walker,
and seems to pass him revolving like the sail of a windmill.
The iron gates of the park shut with a jangling clang.
There are footsteps and loud voices; —a tumult; —a drunken brawl; —an
alarm of fire; —then silence again.
And now at length the city is asleep, and we can see the night.
The belated moon looks over the roofs, and finds no one to welcome her. The moonlight is broken.
It lies here and there in the squares and the opening of the streets —angular like blocks of white marble.
Passage 13. Peace and Development: the Themes of Our Times Peace and development are the themes of the times.
People across the world should join hands in advancing the lofty cause of peace and development of mankind.
A peaceful environment is indispensable for national,
regional and even global development.
Without peace or political stability there would be no economic progress to speak of.
This has been fully proved by both the past and the present.
In today?s world, the international situation is, on the whole, moving towards relaxation.
However, conflicts and even local wars triggered by various factors have kept cropping up,
and tension still remains in some areas.
All this has impeded the economic development of the countries and
regions concerned,
and has also adversely affected the world economy.
All responsible statesmen and governments must abide by the purposes of the UN Charter
and the universally acknowledged norms governing international relations,
and work for a universal, lasting and comprehensive peace.
Nobody should be allowed to cause tension or armed conflicts against the interests of the people.
There are still in this world a few interest groups,
which always want to seek gains by creating tension here and there.
This is against the will of the majority of the people and against the trend of the times.
An enormous market demand can be created and economic prosperity promoted
only when continued efforts are made to advance the cause of peace and development,
to ensure that people around the world live and work in peace and contentment
and focus on economic development and on scientific and technological innovation.
I hope that all of us here today will join hands with all other peace-loving
people
and work for lasting world peace and the common development and prosperity
of all nations and regions.
Passage 14. Self-Esteem
Self-esteem is the combination of self-confidence and self-respect —the conviction that you are competent to cope with life?s challenges and are worthy of happiness.
Self-esteem is the way you talk to yourself about yourself.
Self-esteem has two interrelated aspects;
it entails a sense of personal efficacy and a sense of personal worth. It is the integrated sum of self-confidence and self-respect.
It is the conviction that one is competent to live and worthy of living. Our self-esteem and self-image are developed by how we talk to ourselves.
All of us have conscious and unconscious memories of all the times we felt bad or wrong
—they are part of the unavoidable scars of childhood.
This is where the critical voice gets started.
Everyone has a critical inner voice.
People with low self-esteem simply have a more vicious and demeaning
inner voice.
Psychologists say that almost every aspect of our lives
—our personal happiness, success, relationships with others, achievement, creativity, dependencies
—are dependent on our level of self-esteem.
The more we have, the better we deal with things.
Positive self-esteem is important because when people experience it, they feel good and look good, they are effective and productive,
and they respond to other people and themselves in healthy, positive, growing ways.
People who have positive self-esteem know that they are lovable and capable,
and they care about themselves and other people.
They do not have to build themselves up by tearing other people down or by patronizing less competent people.
Our background largely determines what we will become in personality and more importantly in self-esteem.
Where do feelings of worthlessness come from?
Many come from our families,
since more than 80% of our waking hours up to the age of eighteen are spent under their direct influence.
We are who we are because of where we?ve been.
We build our own brands of self-esteem from four ingredients: fate, the positive things life offers, the negative things life offers
and our own decisions about how to respond to fate, the positives and the negatives.
Neither fate nor decisions can be determined by other people in our own life.
No one can change fate.
We can control our thinking and therefore our decisions in life. Passage 15. Struggle for Freedom
It is not possible for me to express all that I feel of appreciation for what has been said and given to me.
I accept, for myself, with the conviction of having received
far beyond what I have been able to give in my books.
I can only hope that the many books which I have yet to write
will be in some measure a worthier acknowledgment than I can make tonight.
And, indeed, I can accept only in the same spirit
in which I think this gift was originally given
—that it is a prize not so much for what has been done, as for the future. Whatever I write in the future must, I think,
be always benefited and strengthened when I remember this day.
I accept,too, for my country,the United States of America.
We are a people still young and we know that we have not yet come to the fullest of our powers.
This award, given to an American, strengthens not only one,
but the whole body of American writers,
who are encouraged and heartened by such generous recognition. And I should like to say, too, that in my country
it is important that this award has been given to a woman.
You who have already so recognized your own Selma Lagerlof, and have long recognized women in other fields,
cannot perhaps wholly understand what it means in many countries that it is a woman who stands here at this moment.
But I speak not only for writers and for women, but for all Americans, for we all share in this.
I should not be truly myself if I did not, in my own wholly unofficial way, speak also of the people of China,whose life has for so many years been my life also,
whose life,indeed, must always be a part of my life.
The minds of my own country and China, my foster country, are alike in many ways,
but above all, alike in our common love of freedom.
And today more than ever, this is true,
now when China's whole being is engaged in the greatest of all the struggles,
the struggle for freedom.
I have never admired China more than I do now,
when I see her uniting as she has never before,
against the enemy who threatens her freedom.
With this determination for freedom,
which is in so profound a sense the essential quality of her nature, I know that she is unconquerable.
Freedom—it is today more than ever the most precious human possession.
We—Sweden and the United States—we have it still.
My country is young—but it greets you with a peculiar fellowship, you whose earth is ancient and free.
Passage 16. Passing on Small Change
The pharmacist handed me my prescription,apologized for the wait, and explained that his register had already closed.
He asked if I would mind using the register at the front of the store. I told him not to worry and walked up front,
where one person was in line ahead of me,
a little girl no more than seven, with a bottle of medicine on the counter.
She clenched a little green and white striped coin purse closely to her chest.
The purse reminded me of the days when, as a child,
I played dress-up in my grandma?s closet.
I?d march around the house in oversized clothes,
drenched in costume jewelry and hats and scarves,
talking “grownup talk” to anyone who would listen.
I remembered the thrill one day when I gave a pretend dollar to someone, and he handed back some real coins for me to put into my special purse. “Keep the change!”he told me with a wink.
Now the clerk rang up the little girl?s medicine,
while she shakily pulled out a coupon, a dollar bill and some coins. I watched her blush as she tried to count her money,
and I could see right away that she was about a dollar short.
With a quick wink to the clerk,
I slipped a dollar bill onto the counter and signaled the clerk to ring up the sale.
The child scooped her uncounted change into her coin purse,
grabbed her package and scurried out the door.
As I headed to my car, I felt a tug on my shirt.
There was the girl, looking up at me with her big brown eyes.
She gave me a grin, wrapped her arms around my legs for a long moment
then stretched out her little hand.
It was full of coins.“Thank you,” She whispered.
“That?s okay,” I answered.
I flashed her a smile and winked,“Keep the change!”
Passage 17. The Props to Help Man Endure (I)
I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work, a life?s work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit.
Not for glory and least of all, for profit,
but to create out of the material of the human spirit something which did not exist before.
So this award is only mine in trust.
It would not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it, commensurate for the purpose and significance of its origin.
But I would like to do the same with the acclaim too
by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and woman,already dedicated to the same anguish and travail,
among whom is already that one who will someday stand here where I am standing.
Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now
that we can even bear it.
There?re no longer problems of the spirit, there?s only the question; “When will I be blown up?”
Because of this, the young man or woman writing today
has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself,
which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about,
worth the agony and the sweat.
He must learn them again, he must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid,
and teaching himself that,forget it forever,
leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart.
The old universal truths, lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed:
love and honor and pity and pride,
and compassion and sacrifice.
Passage 18. The Props to Help Man Endure (II)
Until he does so, he labors under a curse.
He writes not of love, but of lust,
of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value,
of victories without hope, and most of all, without pity or compassion. His grief weaves on no universal bone, leaving no scars.
He writes not of the heart, but of the glands.
Until he relearns these things,
he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man.
It?s easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure:
that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged
and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tireless in the last red and dying evening,
that even then, there will still be one more sound:
that of his puny and inexhaustible voice, still talking.
I refuse to accept this.
I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail.
He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice,
but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion,and sacrifice, and endurance.
The poets?, the writers? duty is to write about these things.
It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart,
by reminding him of the courage,and honor
and hope and compassion and pity
and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past.
The poets' voice need not merely be the record of man,
it can be one of the props,
the pillars to help him endure and prevail.
Passage 19. What Is Immortal
To see the golden sun and the azure sky, the outstretched ocean, to walk upon the green earth, and to be lord of a thousand creatures, to look down giddy precipices or over distant flowery vales,
to see the world spread out under one?s finger in a map,
to bring the stars near, to view the smallest insects in a microscope,
to read history,and witness the revolutions of empires and the succession of generations,
to hear of the glory of Sidon and Tyre, of Babylon and Susa, as of a faded pageant,
and to say all these were, and are now nothing,
to think that we exist in such a point of time,and in such a corner of space,
to be at once spectators and a part of the moving scene,
to watch the return of the seasons, of spring and autumn, to hear — The stock dove?s notes amid the forest deep,
That drowsy forest rustles to the sighing gale.
— to traverse desert wilderness,to listen to the dungeon's gloom, or sit in crowded theatres and see life itself mocked,
to feel heat and cold, pleasure and pain, right and wrong, truth and falsehood,
to study the works of art and refine the sense of beauty to agony, to worship fame and to dream of immortality,
to have read Shakespeare and Beloit to the same species as Sir Isaac Newton;
to be and to do all this, and then in a moment
to be nothing,to have it all snatched from one
like a juggler? ball or a phantasmagoria...
Passage 20. Suppose Someone Gave You a Pen
Suppose someone gave you a pen — a sealed, solid-colored pen. You couldn?t see how much ink it had.
It might run dry after the first few tentative words
or last just long enough to create a masterpiece (or several)
that would last forever and make a difference in the scheme of things. You don?t know before you begin.
Under the rules of the game, you really never know.
You have to take a chance!
Actually, no rule of the game states you must do anything.
Instead of picking up and using the pen,
you could leave it on a shelf or in a drawer where it will dry up, unused. But if you do decide to use it, what would you do with it?
How would you play the game?
Would you plan and plan before you ever wrote a word?
Would your plans be so extensive that you never even got to the writing? Or would you take the pen in hand, plunge right in and just do it,
struggling to keep up with the twists and turns of the torrents of words that take you where they take you?
Would you write cautiously and carefully,as if the pen might run dry the next moment,
or would you pretend or believe (or pretend to believe)
that the pen will write forever and proceed accordingly?
And of what would you write:
Of love? Hate? Fun? Misery? Life? Death? Nothing? Everything? Would you write to please just yourself? Or others?
Or yourself by writing for others?
Would your strokes be tremblingly timid or brilliantly bold?
Fancy with a flourish or plain?
Would you even write?
Once you have the pen, no rule says you have to write.
Would you sketch? Scribble? Doodle or draw?
Would you stay in or on the lines, or see no lines at all, even if they were there?
Or are they?
There?s a lot to think about here,isn?t there?
Now, suppose someone gave you a life...
Passage 21. Two Ways of Thinking of History
There are two ways of thinking of history.
There is, first, history regarded as a way of looking at other things, really the temporal aspect of anything,
from the universe to this nib with which I am writing.
Everything has its history.
There is the history of the universe,if only we knew it
—and we know something of it, if we do not know much.
Nor is the contrast so great,when you come to think of it,
between the universe and this pen-nib.
A mere pen-nib has quite a considerable history.
There is, to begin with, what has been written with it,
and that might be something quite important.
After all it was probably only one quill-pen or a couple that wrote Hamlet.
Whatever has been written with the pen-nib is part of its History. In addition to that there is the history of its manufacture:
this particular nib is a “Relief” nib, No. 314,
made by R. Esterbrook and Co. in England,
who supply the Midland Bank with pen-nibs, from whom I got it—a gift, I may say.
But behind this nib there is the whole process of manufacture....
In fact a pen nib implies universe,and the history of it implies its history. We may regard this way of looking at it—history—as the time-aspect of all things:
a pen-nib, the universe,the fiddle before me as I write,
as a relative conception of history.
There is, secondly, what we might call a substantive conception of history,
what we usually mean by it, history proper as a subject of study in itself. Passage 22. On the Feeling of Immortality in Youth
No young man believes he will ever die.
It was a saying of my brother?s, and a fine one.
There is a feeling of Eternity in youth,which makes us amend for everything.
To be young is to be as one of the Immortal Gods.
One half of time indeed is flown
—the other half remains in store for us with all its countless treasures, for there is no line drawn, and we see no limit to our hopes and wishes. We make the coming age our own —
The vast, the unbounded prospect lies before us.
Death, old age, are words without a meaning that pass by us
like the idea air which we regard not.
Others may have undergone,or may still be liable to them—we“bear a charmed life”,
which laughs to scorn all such sickly fancies.
As in setting out on delightful journey,we strain our eager gaze forward —Bidding the lovely scenes at distance hail!
And see no end to the landscape, new objects presenting themselves as we advance.
So, in the commencement of life, we set no bounds to our inclinations, nor to the unrestricted opportunities of gratifying them.
We have as yet found no obstacle,no disposition to flag;
and it seems that we can go on so forever.
We look round in a new world,full of life, and motion, and ceaseless progress,
and feel in ourselves all the vigor and spirit to keep pace with it,
and do not foresee from any present symptoms how we shall be left
behind
in the natural course of things, decline into old age, and drop into the grave.
It is the simplicity, and as it were abstractedness of our feelings in youth, that (so to speak) identifies us with nature,
and (our experience being slight and our passions strong)
deludes us into a belief of being immortal like it.
Passage 23. Of Studies
Studies serve for delight, for ornament, and for ability.
Their chief use for delight, is in privateness and retiring;
for ornament, is in discourse;
and for ability, is in the judgement and disposition of business.
For expert men can execute, and perhaps judge of particulars, one by one; but the general counsels, and the plots and marshalling of affairs, come best from those that are learned.
To spend too much time in studies is sloth;
to use them too much for ornament,is affectation;
to make judgement wholly by their rules, is the humour of a scholar. They perfect nature, and are perfected by experience:
for natural abilities are like natural plants,that need pruning by study; and studies themselves do give forth directions too much at large,
except they be bounded in by experience.
Crafty men contemn studies, simple men admire them, and wise men use them;
for they teach not their own use;
but that is a wisdom without them, and above them, won by observation. Read not to contradict and confute;
nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider.
Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed,and some few to be chewed and digested;
that is, some books are to be read only in parts;
others to be read, but not curiously;
and some few to be read wholly,and with diligence and attention.
Some books also may be read by deputy, and extracts made of them by others;
but that would be only in the less important arguments, and the meaner sort of books;
else distilled books are, like common distilled waters, flashy things.
Reading makes a full man； conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.
And therefore,if a man write little，he had need have a great memory; if he confer little, he had need have a present wit;
and if he read little, he had need have much cunning, to seem to know that he does not.
Histories make men wise; poets witty; the mathematics subtle; natural philosophy deep; moral grave;
logic and rhetoric able to contend.
Passage 24. Of Media
International media such as TV network and magazine
always give people in an information age mixed feelings.
Like many other things, media is double-edged.
As primary channels of information,
TV and magazine are convenient and economic sources of information for knowledge, entertainment, and shopping.
Interestingly,sometimes the same piece of information varies considerably
in its influences on audiences of different age.
For example,in a TV commercial,a beautiful lady promotes a certain brand of perfume,
which supposablely makes girls more attractive to boys.
For potential grown-up buyers,
the ad is useful because they might be spending time searching for such products.
We save time in shopping and making decision by making use of such advertisements.
However, a teenage girl might get the wrong idea about the concept of perfume.
She could get money from her parents to buy the advertised product. Worse yet, she might use the appeal strategy employed in the commercial to get ahead in the future.
This is classic bad influence of media for young people?s overspending and inappropriate behaviors.
However, we find it very difficult to weigh between merits and problems of media
because they are often tightly incorporated.
For instance, violent scenes in movies are believed to be
partially responsible for violence-related crimes,
particularly those committed by young people.
But on the contrary,such movies also give people a channel to release their anger,anxiety, and pressure.
Moreover,these movies show us bad and evil as well as punishments for wrongdoings.
Imagine we live in a world whose media is completely clean in such sense.
The dark side of media does not disappear just because we do not talk
about it.
Nevertheless certain kinds of information such as porn are better kept away from young people.
In conclusion, media should not be seen simply as bad or good
because we need to use information properly to the best of our ability. But for certain segments of viewers,
we should be very careful with regard to the content of information
and take measures to keep viewers from possible harmful influences of media.
Passage 25. How to Be Ture to Yourself
My grandparents believed you were either honest or you weren?t. There was no in between.
They had a simple motto hanging on heir living-room wall:
“Life is like a field of newly fallen snow;
where I choose to walk every step will show.”
They didn?t have to talk about it—they demonstrated the motto by the way they lived.
They understood instinctively that integrity means
having a personal standard of morality and ethics
that does not sell out to selfishness and that is not relative to the situation at hand.
Integrity is an inner standard for judging your behavior.
Unfortunately,integrity is in short supply today—and getting scarcer. But it is the real bottom line in every area of society.
And it is something we must demand of ourselves.
A good test for this value is to look at what I call the Integrity Trial, which consists of three key principles:
Stand firmly for your convictions in the face of personal pressure. When you know you?re right, you can?t back down.
Always give others credit that is rightfully theirs.
Don?t be afraid of those who might have a better idea
or who might even be smarter than you are.
Be honest and open about who you really are.
People who lack genuine core values rely on external factors
—their looks or status—in order to feel good about themselves.
Inevitably they will do everything they can to preserve this appearance, but they will do very little, to develop their inner value and personal growth.
So be yourself.
Don?t engage in a personal cover-up of areas that are unpleasing in your life.
When it?s tough, do it tough. In other words,
face reality and be adult in your responses to life?s challenges.
Self-respect and a clear conscience are powerful components of integrity and are the basis for enriching your relationships with others.
Integrity means you do what you do because it?s right
and not just fashionable or politically correct.
A life of principle, of not giving in to the seductive sirens of easy morality,
will always win the day.
It will take you forward into the 21st century
without having to check your tacks in a rearview mirror.
My grandparents taught me that.
Passage 26. Five Balls of Life
Imagine life as a game in which you are juggling some five balls in the air.
You name them work, family,health, friends and spirit
and you?re keeping all of these in the air.
You will soon understand that work is a rubber ball.
If you drop it, it will bounce back.
But the other four balls family, health, friends and spirit are made of glass.
If you drop one of these, they will be irrevocably scuffed, marked, nicked, damaged or even shattered.
They will never be the same.
You must understand that and strive for balance in your life. How? Don?t undermine your worth by comparing yourself with others. It is because we are different that each of us is special.
Don?t set your goals by what other people deem important.
Only you know what is best for you.
Don?t take for granted the things closest to your heart.
Cling to them as they would be your life, for without them, life is meaningless.
Don?t let your life slip through your fingers by living in the past or for the future.
By living your life one day at a time, you live ALL the days of your life. Don?t give up when you still have something to give.
Nothing is really over until the moment you stop trying.
Don?t be afraid to admit that you are less than perfect.
It is this fragile thread that binds us to each together.
Don?t be afraid to encounter risks.
It is by taking chances that we learn how to be brave.
Don?t shut love out of your life by saying it?s impossible to find. The quickest way to receive love is to give it;
the fastest way to lose love is to hold it too tightly;
and the best way to keep love is to give it wings.
Don?t run through life so fast that you forget not only where you?ve been, but also where you are going.
Don?t forget, a person?s greatest emotional need is to feel appreciated. Don?t be afraid to learn.
Knowledge is weightless,a treasure you can always carry easily. Don?t use time or words carelessly.
Neither can be retrieved.
Life is not a race, but a journey to be savored each step of the way. Yesterday is history, Tomorrow is a mystery and Today is a gift: that?s why we call it “The Present”.
Passage 27. The Road to Success
It is well that young men should begin at the beginning
and occupy the most subordinate positions.
Many of the leading businessmen of Pittsburgh had a serious responsibility
thrust upon them at the very threshold of their career.
They were introduced to the broom,
and spent the first hours of their business lives sweeping out the office. I notice we have janitors and janitresses now in offices,
and our young men unfortunately miss that salutary branch of a business education.
But if by chance the professional sweeper is absent any morning,
the boy who has the genius of the future partner in him will not hesitate to try his hand at the broom.
It does not hurt the newest comer to sweep out the office if necessary. I was one of those sweepers myself.
Assuming that you have all obtained employment and are fairly started, my advice to you is “aim high.”
I would not give a fig for the young man who does not already see himself the partner
or the head of an important firm.
Do not rest content for a moment in your thoughts as head clerk,
or foreman, or general manager in any concern, no matter how extensive. Say to yourself,“My place is at the top.”
Be king in your dreams.
And here is the prime condition of success,the great secret:
concentrate your energy,thought, and capital exclusively upon the business
in which you are engaged.
Having begun in one line, resolve to fight it out on that line, to lead in it, adopt every improvement,have the best machinery, and know the most about it.
The concerns which fail are those which have scattered their capital,
which means that they have scattered their brains also.
They have investments in this, or that, or the other,here, there, and everywhere.
“Don?t put all your eggs in one basket” is all wrong.
I tell you “put all your eggs in one basket, and then watch that basket.” It is easy to watch and carry the one basket.
He who carries three baskets must put one on his head,
which is apt to tumble and trip him up.
One fault of the American businessmen is lack of concentration. Passage 28. A Divided House Cannot Stand
If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could better judge what to do, and how to do it.
We are now far into the fifth year since a policy was initiated with the avowed object
and confident promise of putting an end to slavery agitation.
Under the operation of that policy, that agitation has not only not ceased, but has constantly augmented.
In my opinion, it will not cease until a crisis shall have been reached and passed.
“A house divided against itself cannot stand.”
I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half
free.
I do not expect the Union to be dissolved;
I do not expect the house to fall; but I do expect it will cease to be divided.
It will become all one thing, or all the other.
Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that
it is in the course of ultimate extinction,
or its advocates will push it forward till it shall become alike lawful in all the States,
old as well as new, North as well as South.
Have we no tendency to the latter condition?
Let any one who doubts, carefully contemplate that now almost complete legal combination
—piece of machinery,so to speak—compounded of the Nebraska doctrine and the Dred Scott decision.
Let him consider, not only what work the machinery is adapted to do, and how well adapted, but also let him study the history of its construction,and trace,
if he can, or rather fail, if he can, to trace the evidences of design and concert of action
Passage 29. Alone Again, Naturally
Alone, we squander life by rejecting its full potential
and wasting its remaining promises.
Alone, we accept that experiences unshared are barely worthwhile, that sunsets viewed singly are not as spectacular,
that time spent apart is fallow and pointless.
And so we grow old believing we are nothing by ourselves,
steadfastly shunning the opportunities for self-discovery
and personal growth that solitude could bring us.
We?ve even coined a word for those who prefer to be by themselves: antisocial, as if they were enemies of society.
They are viewed as friendless, suspect in a world that goes around in twos or more
and is wary of solitary travelers.
People who need people are threatened by people who don?t.
The idea of seeking contentment alone is heretical,
for society steadfastly decrees that our completeness lies in others. Instead, we cling to each other for solace, comfort,and safety,
believing that we are nothing alone—insignificant, unfulfilled, lost— accepting solitude in the tiniest, most reluctant of slices, if at all, which is tragic, for it rejects Gods precious gift of life.
Ironically, most of us crave more intimacy and companionship than we
can bear.
We begrudge ourselves,our spouses,
and our partners sufficient physical and emotional breathing room, and then bemoan the suffocation of our relationships.
To point out these facts is not to suggest we should abandon all our close ties.
Medical surveys show that the majority of elderly people who live alone, yet maintain frequent contact with relatives and friends,
rate their physical and emotional well-being as “excellent.”
Just as an apple a day kept the doctor away when they were young, an active social calendar appears to serve the same purpose now. Passage 30. The Blue Days
Everybody has blue days.
These are miserable days when you feel lousy, grumpy, lonely, and utterly exhausted.
Days when you feel small and insignificant, when everything seems just out of reach.
You can?t rise to the occasion.
Just getting started seems impossible.
On blue days you can become paranoid that everyone is out to get you. This is not always such a bad thing.
You feel frustrated and anxious, which can induce a nail-biting frenzy that can escalate into a triple-chocolate-mud-cake-eating frenzy in a blink of an eye!
On blue days you feel like you?re floating in an ocean of sadness.
You?re about to burst into tears at any moment and you don?t even know why.
Ultimately, you feel like you?re wandering through life without purpose. You?re not sure how much longer you can hang on, and you feel like shouting,
“Will someone please shoot me!”
It doesn?t take much to bring on a blue day.
You might just wake up not feeling or looking your best,
find some new wrinkles, put on a little weight, or get a huge pimple on your nose.
You could forget your date?s name or have an embarrassing photograph published.
You might get dumped,divorced, or fired, make a fool of yourself in public,
be afflicted with a demeaning nickname,or just have a plain old bad-hair day.
Maybe work is a pain in the butt.
You?re under major pressure to fill someone else?s shoes,
your boss is picking on you, and everyone in the office is driving you crazy.
You might have a splitting headache,or a slipped dish, bad breath, a toothache,
chronic gas, dry lips, or a nasty ingrown toenail.
Whatever the reason, you?re convinced that someone up there doesn?t like you.
Oh what to do, what to dooo?
Passage 31. Choose Optimism
If you expect something to turn out badly, it probably will.
Pessimism is seldom disappointed.
But the same principle also works in reverse.
If you expect good things to happen, they usually do!
There seems to be a natural cause-and-effect relationship between optimism and success.
Optimism and pessimism are both powerful forces,
and each of us must choose which we want to shape our outlook and our expectations.
There is enough good and bad in everyone?s life—ample sorrow and happiness,
sufficient joy and pain—to find a rational basis for either optimism or
pessimism.
We can choose to laugh or cry, bless or curse.
It?s our decision: From which perspective do we want to view life? Will we look up in hope or down in despair?
I believe in the upward look.
I choose to highlight the positive and slip right over the negative. I am an optimist by choice as much as by nature.
Sure, I know that sorrow exists.
I am in my 70s now, and I?ve lived through more than one crisis.
But when all is said and done, I find that the good in life far outweighs the bad.
An optimistic attitude is not a luxury; it?s a necessity.
The way you look at life will determine how you feel, how you perform, and how well you will get along with other people.
Conversely, negative thoughts, attitudes,and expectations feed on themselves;
they become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Pessimism creates a dismal place where no one wants to live.
The only thing more powerful than negativism is a positive affirmation, a word of optimism and hope.
One of the things I am most thankful for is the fact that
I have grown up in a nation with a grand tradition of optimism.
When a whole culture adopts an upward look, incredible things can be accomplished.
When the world is seen as a hopeful, positive place,
people are empowered to attempt and to achieve.
Passage 32. Why Should We Live with Such Hurry
Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life?
We are determined to be starved before we are hungry.
Men say that a stitch in time saves nine,
and so they take a thousand stitches today to save nine tomorrow. As for work, we haven?t any of any consequence.
We have the Saint Vitus’ dance，and cannot possibly keep our heads still. If I should only give a few pulls at the parish bellrope, as for a fire, that is,without setting the bell, there is hardly a man on his farm
in the outskirts of Concord,notwithstanding that press of engagements which was his excuse so many times this morning,nor a boy, nor a woman,
I might almost say, but would forsake all and follow that sound, not mainly to save property from the flames,but,
if we will confess the truth, much more to see it burn, since burn it must, and we, be it known, did not set it on fire—or to see it put out, and have a hand in it, if that is done as handsomely;
yes, even if it were the parish church itself.
Hardly a man takes a half-hour?s nap after dinner,
but when he wakes he holds up his head and asks,
“What?s the news?” as if the rest of mankind had stood his sentinels. Some give directions to be waked every half-hour, doubtless for no other purpose;
and then, to pay for it, they tell what they have dreamed.
After a night?s sleep the news is as indispensable as the breakfast.
“Pray tell me anything new that has happened to a man anywhere on this globe”,
—and he reads it over his coffee and rolls,
that a man has had his eyes gouged out this morning on the Wachito River;
never dreaming the while that he lives in the dark unfathomed mammoth cave of this world,
and has but the rudiment of an eye himself.
Passage 33. A Woman’s Tears
“Why are you crying?” he asked his Mom.
“Because I?m a woman.” she told him.
“I don?t understand,” he said.
His Mom just hugged him and said, “And you never will ... ”
Later the little boy asked his father, “Why does mother seem to cry for no reason?”
“All women cry for no reason.” was all his Dad could say.
The little boy grew up and became a man, still wondering why women cry.
Finally he put in a call to God;
when God got on the phone, the man said, “God, why do women cry so easily?”
God said,“When I made woman she had to be special.
I made her shoulders strong enough to carry the weight of the world; yet gentle enough to give comfort.
I gave her an inner strength to endure childbirth
and the rejection that many times comes from her children.
I gave her a hardness that allows her to keep going when everyone else gives up
and take care of her family through fatigue and sickness without complaining.
I gave her the sensitivity to love her children under any and all circumstances,
even when her child has hurt them very badly.
I gave her strength to carry her husband through his faults
and fashioned her from his rib to protect his heart.
I gave her wisdom to know that a good husband never hurts his wife,
but sometimes tests her strengths and her resolve to stand beside him unfalteringly.
I gave her a tear to shed.
It?s hers exclusively to use whenever it is needed.
It?s her only weakness.
It’s a tear for mankind.”
Passage 34. Laziness
Laziness is a sin: everyone knows that.
We have probably all had lectures pointing out that laziness is immoral, that it is wasteful, and that lazy people will never amount to anything in life.
But laziness can be more harmful than that,
and it is often caused by more complex reasons than the simple wish to avoid work.
Some people who appear to be lazy are suffering from much more serious problems.
They may be so distrustful of their fellow workers
that they are unable to join in any group task for fear of being laughed at or fear of having their ideas stolen.
These people who seem lazy may be deadened by a fear of failure
that prevents fruitful work.
Or other sorts of fantasies may prevent work:
some people are so busy planning,
sometimes planning great deals of fantastic achievements,
that they are unable to deal with whatever“lesser” work is on hand. Still other people are not avoiding work,strictly speaking;
they are nearly procrastinating—rescheduling their day.
Laziness can actually be helpful.
Like procrastinators,some people look lazy when they are really thinking, planning,researching.
We should all remember that some great scientific discoverise occurred by chance.
Newton wasn?t working in the orchard when the apple hit him and he devised the theory of gravity.
All of us would like to have someone “lazy” build the car or stove we buy,
particularly if that “laziness”
—were caused by the worker?s taking time to check each step of his work and to do his job right.
And sometimes,being “lazy”, that is,
taking time off for a rest is good for the overworked students or executive.
Taking a rest can be particularly helpful to the athlete who is trying too hard
or the doctor who?s simply working himself overtime too many evenings at the clinic.
So be careful when you?re tempted to call someone lazy.
That person may be thinking,
resting or planning his or her next book.
Passage 35. Owning Books
We enjoy reading books that belong to us much more than if they are borrowed.
A borrowed book is like a guest in the house;
it must be treated with punctiliousness, with a certain considerate formality.
You must see that it sustains no damage; it must not suffer while under your roof.
But your own books belong to you;
you treat them with that affectionate intimacy that annihilates formality. Books are for use, not for show;
you should own no book that you are afraid to mark up,
or afraid to place on the table, wide open and face down.
A good reason for marking favorite passages in books
is that this practice enables you to remember more easily the significant sayings,
to refer to them quickly, and then in later years,
it is like visiting a forest where you once blazed a trail.
Everyone should begin collecting a private library in youth;
the instinct of private property can here be cultivated with every advantage and no evils.
The best of mural decorations is books;
they are more varied in color and appearance than any wallpaper, they are more attractive in design,
and they have the prime advantage of being separate personalities, so that if you sit alone in the room in the firelight,
you are surrounded with intimate friends.
The knowledge that they are there in plain view is both stimulating and refreshing.
Books are of the people, by the people, for the people.
Literature is the immortal part of history;
it is the best and most enduring part of personality.
Book-friends have this advantage over living friends;
you can enjoy the most truly aristocratic society in the world whenever you want it.
The great dead are beyond our physical reach,
and the great living are usually almost as inaccessible.
But in a private library,
you can at any moment converse with Socrates or Shakespeare or Carlyle or Dumas or Dickens.
And there is no doubt that in these books you see these men at their best. They "laid themselves out," they did their ultimate best to entertain you, to make a favorable impression.
You are necessary to them as an audience is to an actor;
only instead of seeing them masked,
you look into their innermost heart of heart.
Passage 36. Olympic Games
In ancient Greece athletic festivals were very important
and had strong religious associations.
The Olympian athletic festival held every four years in honor of Zeus, king of the Olympian Gods, eventually lost its local character, became first a national event and then,
after the rules against foreign competitors had been abolished, international.
No one knows exactly how far back the Olympic Games go,
but some official records date from 776B.C.
The games took place in August on the plain by Mount Olympus.
Many thousands of spectators gathered from all parts of Greece, but no married woman was admitted even as a spectator.
Slaves, women and dishonored persons were not allowed to compete. The exact sequence of events is uncertain,
but events included boy?s gymnastics, boxing, wrestling, horse racing and field events,
though there were fewer sports involved than in the modern Olympic Games.
On the last day of the Games,
all the winners were honored by having a ring of holy olive leaves placed on their heads.
So great was the honor that the winner of the foot race
gave his name to the year of his victory.
Although Olympic winners received no prize money,
they were, in fact, richly rewarded by their state authorities.
How their results compared with modern standards,
we unfortunately have no means of telling.
After an uninterrupted history of almost 1,200 years,
the Games were suspended by the Romans in 394 A.D.
They continued for such a long time
because people believed in the philosophy behind the Olympics: the idea that a healthy body produced a healthy mind,
and that the spirit of competition in sports and games was preferable to the competition that caused wars.
It was over 1,500 years before another such international athletic gathering took place in Athens in 1896.
Nowadays,the Games are held in different countries in turn.
The host country provides vast facilities,
including a stadium, swimming pools and living accommodation, but competing countries pay their own athletes? expenses.
Passage 37. Life Lessons
Sometimes people come into your life and you know right away that they were meant to be there,
to serve some sort of purpose,teach you a lesson,
or to help you figure out who you are or who you want to become. You never know who these people may be
—a roommate, a neighbor, a professor, a friend, a lover, or even a complete stranger
—but when you lock eyes with them,
you know at that very moment they will affect your life in some profound way.
Sometimes things happen to you that may seem horrible,painful, and unfair at first,
but in reflection you find that without overcoming those obstacles
you would have never realized your potential, strength,willpower, or heart.
Everything happens for a reason.
Nothing happens by chance or by means of good or bad luck.
Illness,injury, love, lost moments of true greatness,
and sheer stupidity all occur to test the limits of your soul.
Without these small tests, whatever they may be,
life would be like a smoothly paved straight flat road to nowhere. It would be safe and comfortable,but dull and utterly pointless. The people you meet who affect your life,
and the success and downfalls you experience,
help to create who you are and who you become.
Even the bad experiences can be learned from.
In fact, they are sometimes the most important ones.
If someone loves you, give love back to them in whatever way you can, not only because they love you, but because in a way,
they are teaching you to love and how to open your heart and eyes to things.
If someone hurts you, betrays you, or breaks your heart,forgive them, for they have helped you learn about trust
and the importance of being cautious to whom you open your heart.
Make every day count.
Appreciate every moment and take from those moments everything that you possibly can
for you may never be able to experience it again.
Talk to people that you have never talked to before,
and listen to what they have to say.
Let yourself fall in love, break free, and set your sights high.
Hold your head up because you have every right to.
Tell yourself you are a great individual and believe in yourself, for if you don?t believe in yourself,
it will be hard for others to believe in you.
Passage 38. Rain of Seattle I
I?ve got a deep secret few people understand and even fewer will admit to sharing.
It?s time to tell the truth:
I love the rain, deeply and passionately and more than the sun. At least I live in the right place,
famous for its damp weather and spawning its own genuine rainforest. I can?t imagine living anywhere else than the Pacific Northwest.
The sun shines so infrequently that my friends forget where they put their sunglasses.
Gloomy clouds cause many people around here to suffer from seasonal affective disorder.
Yet I welcome the rain.
Seattleites will say they like how rain keeps the city green,
how clean the air tastes afterwards.
My real reason for enjoying the rain is steeped in pure selfishness when it?s mucky outside,
I don?t have to do anything.
I can spend the afternoon curled up reading,
build a fire and make a big pot of spiced tea.
I can sleep in late, waking up occasionally to hear soothing patter on the roof,
water racing down the gutter.
Nobody expects me to leave my house or do anything overly productive. Maybe I?ll invite a few friends over to watch an old movie or play a board game.
Friendsexpectations are low and easy to meet.
Summer in Seattle is beautiful but exhausting.
The sunny, gorgeous weather and blue skies draw Seattleites from their cozy little homes,
ready to dry out and have fun.
People go hiking, biking, canoeing.
Folks work in their gardens, wash their cars
and attend outdoor concerts in the park all in the same day!
The effort involved to throw a party ratchets up several notches, as people host barbecues and picnics and water-skiing parties. Passage 39. Rain of Seattle II
It?s a sin around here to not thoroughly enjoy every moment of every golden day.
It?s embarrassing to answer,
“Did you get out and enjoy the sunshine this weekend?” with “No, I stayed inside.”
Co-workers frown and exchange suspicious looks;
apparently I?m one of those rain-loving slugs.
I tried lying, but my pale complexion gave me away.
Another mark in rain?s favor is that my body doesn?t betray me when it?s cold and damp outside.
Throughout the winter,people wear several layers,
with perhaps several extra pounds here and there.
In June I dig out my shorts to discover my thighs resemble cottage cheese.
I dread buying a swimsuit,
as consecutive horror and humiliation make me cringe in the dressing
room.
Even my tastebuds prefer the rain.
When it storms outside, it?s time for steamy hot chocolate or even a soothing toddy.
People devour hot, hearty meals, with lots of potatoes and savory sauces. This type of eating evaporates when the sun comes out;
suddenly everyone offers salads and ice water and expects it to be satisfying.
It?s time to publicly acknowledge that I love the rain.
How it transforms my house into a cozy cave where I can spend the afternoon cooking and dreaming.
It seems nobody else will admit to a love affair with the rain,
nobody else will groan when it?s hot outside and join me in a rain dance. When the sun comes out I do greet it with a smile,
slipping sunglasses to my purse and pulling a tank top out of my closet. Yet my comfortable sweaters and warm slippers beckon,
making me wish for another wet, chilly afternoon.
When the rain returns, I will grin even more.
Am I the only one?
Passage 41. The 50-Percent Theory of Life
I believe in the 50-percent theory.
Half the time things are better than normal; the other half, they are worse. I believe life is a pendulum swing.
It takes time and experience to understand what normal is,
and that gives me the perspective to deal with the surprises of the future. Let?s benchmark the parameters: Yes, I will die.
I?ve dealt with the deaths of both parents, a best friend, a beloved boss and cherished pets.
Some of these deaths have been violent, before my eyes, or slow and agonizing.
Bad stuff, and it belongs at the bottom of the scale.
Then there are those high points: romance and marriage to the right person;
having a child and doing those Dad things like coaching my son?s baseball team,
paddling around the creek in the boat while he?s swimming with the dogs; discovering his compassion so deep it manifests even in his kindness to snails,
his imagination so vivid he builds a spaceship from a scattered pile of Legos.
But there is a vast meadow of life in the middle, where the bad and the good flip-flop acrobatically.
This is what convinces me to believe in the 50-percent theory.
One spring I planted corn too early in a bottomland so flood-prone that neighbors laughed.
I felt chagrined at the wasted effort.
Summer turned brutal—the worst heat wave and drought in my lifetime. The air-conditioner died, the well went dry, the marriage ended, the job lost, the money gone.
I was living lyrics from a country tune—music I loathed.
Only a surging Kansas City Royals team, bound for their first World Series, buoyed my spirits.
Looking back on that horrible summer,
I soon understood that all succeeding good things merely offset the bad. Worse than normal wouldn?t last long.
I am owed and savor the halcyon times.
They reinvigorate me for the next nasty surprise and offer assurance that I can thrive.
The 50-percent theory even helps me see hope beyond my Royals? recent slump,
a field of struggling rookies sown so that some year soon we can reap an October harvest.
Passage 42. The Road to Happiness
If you look around at the men and women whom you can call happy,
you 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 recovery,
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 convinced,would increase their happiness more
by walking six miles every day
than by any conceivable change of philosophy.
Passage 43. Two Views of the River
Now when I had mastered the language of this water,
and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river
as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet,
I had made a valuable acquisition.
But I had lost something, too.
I had lost something which could never be restored to me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry, had gone out of the majestic river! I still kept in mind a certain wonderful sunset which I witnessed when steamboating was new to me.
A broad expanse of the river was turned to blood;
in the middle distance the red hue brightened into gold,
through which a solitary log came floating, black and conspicuous; in one place, a long slanting mark lay sparkling upon the water; in another the surface was broken by boiling, tumbling rings,
that were as many-tinted as an opal;
where the ruddy flush was faintest,
was a smooth spot that was covered with graceful circles and radiating lines,
ever so delicately traced;
the shore on our left was densely wooded,
and the somber shadow that fell from this forest
was broken in one place by a long, ruffled trail that shone like silver;
and high above the forest wall a clean-stemmed dead tree waved a single leafy bough
that glowed like a flame in the unobstructed splendor that was flowing from the sun.
There were graceful curves,reflected images, woody heights,soft distances;
and over the whole scene, far and near, the dissolving lights drifted steadily,
enriching it every passing moment with new marvels of coloring. Passage 44. How Germans See Others
The Germans generally adore England and have suffered in the past from unrequited love.
England used to be the ultimate role model with its amazingly advanced political,
social, industrial and technological achievements.
The Germans regard the English as being very nice and mostly harmless,almost German.
They admire Americans for the (un-German) easygoing pragmatism and dislike them for their (un-German) superficiality.
For the Germans,the United States is the headmaster in the school of nations,
and accord due respect if not always affection.
Germans are strong believers in authority.
If you know how to obey, then you can also be a master runs the refrain. With the Italian Germans have a close understanding
because they have so much history in common.
Through wars, invasion and other forms of tourism,
a deep and lasting friendship has been established.
Italian art treasures, food and beaches are thoroughly appreciated. There is also a connection arising from the fact that
Italy and Germany both achieved nationhood in the last century, and are still not entirely sure that this was a good thing.
The French are admired for their sophisticated civilization,
and pitied for their inferior culture.
The French may have higher spirits, but the Germans have deeper souls. Despite this, Francophilia is widespread among Germans,
especially those living close to the French border.
Like a wistful child looking over the garden fence,
Germans envy Mediterranean people for more relaxed attitudes, cultural heritage and warm climate.
But only when they are on holiday.
The only people to whom the Germans readily concede
unquestioned superiority of Teutonic virtues are the Swiss.
No German would argue their supremacy in the fields of order, punctuality,diligence, cleanliness and thoroughness.
They have never been to war with the Swiss.
If experience has taught them one thing,
it is that there is not future outside the community of nations.
No other nation has a stronger sense of the importance of getting along with others.
Tolerance is not only a virtue,
It?s a duty.
Passage 45. Napoleon to Josephine
I have your letter, my adorable love.
It has filled my heart with joy.
Since I left you I have been sad all the time.
My only happiness is near you.
I go over endlessly in my thought of your kisses,your tears, your delicious jealousy.
The charm of my wonderful Josephine kindles a living,
blazing fire in my heart and senses.
When shall I be able to pass every minute near you,
with nothing to do but to love you
and nothing to think of but the pleasure of telling you of it and giving you proof of it?
I loved you some time ago; since then I feel that I love you a thousand
times better.
Ever since I have known you I adore you more every day.
That proves how wrong is that saying of La Bruyere “Love comes all of a sudden.”
Ah, let me see some of your faults;
be less beautiful,less graceful, less tender,less good.
But never be jealous and never shed tears.
Your tears send me out of my mind... they set my very blood on fire.
Believe me that it is utterly impossible for me to have a single thought that is not yours,
a single fancy that is not submissive to your will.
Rest well. Restore your health.
Come back to me and then at any rate before we die we ought to be able to say:
“We were happy for so very many days!”
Millions of kisses even to your dog.
Passage 46 When Heaven and Earth Kiss
For my money, a good sunset is the cheapest shot of wonder out there. Think of it —bursts of incandescent energy that can curl your toes, warm your soul, and prove cost effective all at the same time.
The iciest hearts on the planet can be thawed by the heaven?s burnished
flame.
Countries sitting down for peace talks ought to begin
with a joint viewing of rose-dipped hues and golden halos
merging into growing flowers of light.
And for romance, this daily dose of celestial seduction
is just what the love doctor ordered.
When first meeting the incredible woman who is now my wife,
I quickly caught what Bonnie was about when I asked the age-worn question,
“So, what do you do?”
“I chase sunsets,” she replied. I was a goner.
I?m not sure if that was the exact moment when I fell in love,
but it was, at least, the start of my descent.
Cut to our honeymoon and one of my favorite settings in the world —Ireland, the Emerald Isle.
One day we were traveling from the city of Galway toward the Ring of Kerry.
Late in the afternoon we discovered that a boat up ahead
could ferry us across a tributary and save some four hours? driving time. I made for the last launch, a mere ten minutes and eighteen kilometers away.
With luck, and no livestock crossings, we would just make it.
All of a sudden Bonnie called out, “Stop!”
Dutifully, I pulled over.
Bonnie pointed to the sky.
It was the sunset.
Not just any sunset.
This clearly was a masterpiece.
Getting out, we drank deep of a heavenly show of amber and golden hues,
rose finger clouds painting the broad canvas of sky.
The bridge would wait another day.
The Ring of Kerry wasn?t going anywhere.
Bonnie and I inhaled the magnificent sunset like ambrosia.
Sunsets, and sunrises for that matter, are gifts served up in plentiful procession.
It?s one of life?s ways of taking a simple pause, marking the day.
If we?re too busy, caught in the whirlwind of our own manufacturing, we miss the magic.
What is required in order to drink the heady miracle of morning or evening light
is a consciousness of how we use the time allotted to us each day.
Pausing for a moment, we willingly open our spirits to the gifts of the universe.
These are indeed the gifts that help make life this good.
Passage 47 Disrupting My Comfort Zone
I was 45 years old when I decided to learn how to surf.
They say that life is tough enough.
But I guess I like to make things difficult on myself, because I do that all the time.
Every day and on purpose.
That's because I believe in disrupting my comfort zone.
When I started out in the entertainment business,
I made a list of people that I thought would be good to me.
Not people who could give me a job or a deal,
but people who could shake me up, teach me something, challenge my ideas about myself and the world.
So I started calling up experts in all kinds of fields.
Some of them were world-famous.
Of course, I didn't know any of these people and none of them knew me. So when I called these people up to ask them for a meeting,
the response wasn't always friendly.
And even when they agreed to give me some of their time,
the results weren't always what one might describe as pleasant. Take, for example, Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb.
It took me a year of begging and more begging to get to him to agree to meet with me.
And then what happened? He ridiculed me and insulted me.
But that was okay.
I was hoping to learn something from him—and I did,
even if it was only that I'm not that interesting to a physicist with no taste for our pop culture.
Over the last 30 years, I've produced more than 50 movies and 20 television series.
I'm successful and, in my business, pretty well known.
So why do I continue to subject myself to this sort of thing?
The answer is simple:
Disrupting my comfort zone, bombarding myself with challenging people and situations
—this is the best way that I know to keep growing.
And to paraphrase a biologist I once met,
if you're not growing, you're dying.
So maybe I'm not the best surfer on the north shore, but that's okay.
The discomfort, the uncertainty, the physical and mental challenge that I get from this
—all the things that too many of us spend our time and energy trying to avoid
—they are precisely the things that keep me in the game.
Passage 48 The One Way to Become an Artist
Pupils in all the schools in this country are now exposed to all kinds of temptations
which blunt their feelings.
I constantly feel discouraged in addressing them
because I know not how to tell them boldly what they ought to do, when I feel how practically difficult it is for them to do it.
If you paint as you ought, and study as you ought,
depend upon it the public will take no notice of you for a long while.
If you study wrongly, and try to draw the attention of the public upon you,
—supposing you to be clever students—you will get swift reward; but the reward does not come fast when it is sought wisely;
it is always held aloof for a little while;
the right roads of early life are very quiet ones,
hedged in from nearly all help or praise.
But the wrong roads are noisy, —vociferous everywhere with all kinds of demand upon you for art
which is not properly art at all;
and in the various meetings of modern interests, money is to be made in
every way;
but art is to be followed only in one way.
Our Schools of Art are confused by the various teaching and various interests
that are now abroad among us.
Everybody is talking about art, and writing about it, and more or less interested in it;
everybody wants art, and there is not art for everybody,
and few who talk know what they are talking about;
thus students are led in all variable ways,
while there is only one way in which they can make steady progress, for true art is always and will be always one.
Whatever changes may be made in the customs of society,
whatever new machines we may invent, whatever new manufactures we may supply,
Fine Art must remain what it was two thousand years ago, in the days of Phidias;
two thousand years hence, it will be, in all its principles,
and in all its great effects upon the mind of man, just the same.
Observe this that I say, please, carefully, for I mean it to the very utmost. There is but one right way of doing any given thing required of an artist; there may be a hundred wrong, deficient, or mannered ways,
but there is only one complete and right way.
Passage 49 Book and Life
Books are to mankind what memory is to the individual.
They contain the history of our race, the discoveries we have made, the accumulated knowledge and experience of ages;
they picture for us the miracles and beauties of nature, help us in our difficulties,
comfort us in sorrow and in suffering, change hours of weariness into moments of delight,
store our minds with ideas, fill them with good and happy thoughts, and lift us out of and above ourselves.
Many of those who have had, as we say, all that this world can give, have yet told us they owed much of their purest happiness to books. Macaulay had wealth and fame, rank and power,
and yet he tells us in his biography that he owed the happiest hours of his life to books.
He says, “If any one would make me the greatest king that ever lived, with palaces and gardens and fine dinners, and wines and coaches, and beautiful clothes,
and hundreds of servants, on condition that I should not read books, I would not be a king;
I would rather be a poor man in a garret with plenty of books than a king who didn?t love reading.”
Precious and priceless are the blessings which the books scatter around our daily paths.
We walk, in imagination, with the noblest spirits,
through the most solemn and charming regions.
Without stirring from our firesides we may roam to the most remote regions of the earth,
or soar into realms when Spenser's shapes of unearthly beauty flock to meet us,
where Milton's angels peal in our ears the choral hymns of Paradise. Science, art, literature, philosophy,
—all that man has thought, all that man has done,
—the experience that has been bought with the sufferings of a hundred generations,
—all are garnered up for us in the world of books.
Passage 50 Snow and the Passage of Time
Any snowfall which brings traffic to a standstill
and closes schools takes me back to one particular storm in my youth on the shores of Lake Area.
On that day, schools and stores were closed because of the weather.
What resonates for me is a six-block walk I took with my father from our house to the post office.
He bought me stamps for my recently started stamp collection.
I already had a wild assortment of cancelled stamps from around the world.
He brought me brand-new stamps.
I can retrace the route in my mind, walking on snow-covered sidewalks and streets.
It was unusual to be going for a walk with my father on a weekday and so close to home.
In the following years, I never talked about that walk with him,
I never even thought about it until it appeared to me about a decade ago.
A winter memory now returned to the forefront.
The elderly are said to be in the winter of their lives,
and winter is synonymous with the end of life.
That does not make the winter the Grim Reaper; rather,
it is a time of reflection in those for whom childhood is long gone. My father died in the summer of 1997.
For me, his final months resembled the patterns of settling in for winter, a turning inward and slowing down.
In the end, his breath grew shallower until there was just the quiet. There are emotional powers that accompany the season,
a blanket of white ties the landscape into a continuous and undulating hall.
The curve of hillsides in the foundations of houses all is connected. The season keeps us indoors.
Our thoughts and feelings turn inward.
I'm visiting Southern California as I write this,
a place where winter expresses itself as rain.
It would be easy to live in a climate where there are no freezing temperatures snow,
but I would still define the shape of the year by winter
as I knew it from my childhood.
Passage 51. Sorrow of the Millionaire
The unfortunate millionaire has the responsibility of tremendous wealth without the possibility of enjoying himself more than any ordinary rich man.
Indeed, in many things he cannot enjoy himself more than many poor men do,
nor even so much, for a drum major is better dressed,
a trainer?s stable lad often rides a better horse;
the first-class carriage is shared by office boys taking their young ladies out for the evening;
everybody who goes down to Brighton for Sunday rides in the Pullman car;
and for what use is it to be able to pay for a peacock?s brain sandwich when there is nothing to be had but ham or beef?
The injustice of this state of things has not been sufficiently considered.
A man with an income of ￡25 a year can multiply his comfort beyond all calculation
by doubling his income.
A man with ￡50 a year can at least quadruple his comfort by doubling his income.
Probably up to even ￡250 a year doubled income means doubled comfort.
After that the increment of comfort grows less in proportion to the increment of income
until a point is reached at which the victim is satiated and even surfeited with everything that money can purchase.
To expect him to enjoy another hundred thousand pounds because men like money,
is exactly as if you were to expect a confectioner?s shopboy
to enjoy two hours more work a day because boys are fond of sweets. What can the wretched millionaire do that needs a million?
Does he want a fleet of yachts, a Rotten Row full of carriages, an army of
servants,
a whole city of town houses, or a continent for a game preserve? Can he attend more than one theatre in one-evening,
or wear more than one suit at a time, or digest more meals than his butler? And yet there is no sympathy for this hidden sorrow of plutocracy. The poor alone are pitied.
Societies spring up in all directions to relieve all sorts of comparatively happy people,
but no hand is stretched out to the millionaire,except to beg.
In all our dealings with him lies implicit,
the delusion that he has nothing to complain of,
and that he ought to be ashamed of rolling in wealth
whilst others are starving.
Passage 52. Address at Gettysburg
Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation,
conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war.
We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in larger sense, we cannot dedicate—we cannot consecrate—we cannot hallow—this ground.
The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here,
have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.
It is for us, the living,rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.
It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us
—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion;
that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
Passage 53. Choosing an Occupation
Dear sir,
I am very sorry that the pressure of other occupations has prevented me from sending an earlier reply to your letter.
In my opinion a man?s first duty is to find a way of supporting himself, thereby relieving other people of the necessity of supporting him. Moreover, the learning to do work of practical value in the world, in an exact and careful manner, is of itself a very important education, the effects of which make themselves felt in all other pursuits.
The habit of doing that which you do not care about when you would much rather be doing something else, is invaluable.
It would have saved me a frightful waste of time if I had ever had it drilled into me in youth.
Success in any scientific career requires an unusual equipment of capacity, industry, and energy.
If you possess that equipment, you will find leisure enough after your daily commercial work is over,
to make an opening in the scientific ranks for yourself.
If you don't, you had better stick to commerce.
Nothing is less to be desired than the fate of a young man who,
as the Scotch proverb says, in “trying to make a spoon spoils a horn,” and becomes a mere hanger-on in literature or in science,
when he might have been a useful and a valuable member of Society in other occupations.
I think that your father ought to see this letter.
Yours faithfully, T. H. Huxley
Passage 54. Dining Etiquette When Dating
Be sure to make reservations if the restaurant you chose is a fancy or popular one.
It?s very embarrassing to show up without reservations and having to wait for a table,
leaving very bad impression on your date.
Also, be sure to check to see if they have a dress code
and tell your date in advance what to wear.
When your food arrives, proper dinning etiquette requires you to eat at a moderate pace
so that you have time to talk.
A good measure of how fast you should eat is to count 10 seconds between each mouthful
and it?s a bad dining etiquette if you gobble down your food
and you spend the rest of the time watching your date eat.
Don?t slurp your soup, smack your lips, or chew with your mouth open. Nothing is more unsightly than watching someone talk and chew their food at the same time.
Your napkin should be placed on your lap at all times.
Don?t tuck it into your belt or use it as a bib.
If you have to get up, place it neatly on your seat.
When eating, insert your fork straight in your mouth.
Don?t place your fork in the side of your mouth
as it increases the chances of food sliding away, which could be very embarrassing.
If you get food stuck in your mouth
don?t pick it out with your fingers or fork at the table.
Excuse yourself and go to the restroom and get it out with a toothpick. When dinning, keep your eyes on your date at all times
and try to smile between mouthfuls.
Occasionally,you should make an effort to show some interest and ask questions like,“How do you like the beef?”
If she needs anything, you are the one who is supposed to flag down the waiter
by a gentle wave of the hand until someone notices you.
Passage 55. Stress and Relaxation
It is commonly believed that only rich middle-aged businessmen suffer from stress.
In fact anyone may become ill as a result of stress
if they experience a lot of worry over a long period
and their health is not especially good.
Stress can be a friend or an enemy:
it can warn you that you are under too much pressure and should change your way of life.
It can kill you if you don?t notice the warning signals.
Doctors agree that it is probably the biggest single cause of illness in the Western world.
When we are very frightened and worried
our bodies produce certain chemicals to help us fight what is troubling us. Unfortunately, these chemicals produce the energy needed to run away fast from an object of fear,
and in modern life that?s often impossible.
If we don?t use up these chemicals, or if we produce too many of them, they may actually harm us.
The parts of the body that are most affected by stress are the stomach, heart,skin, head and back.
Stress can cause car accidents, heart attacks, and alcoholism, and may even drive people to suicide.
Our living and working conditions may put us under stress.
Overcrowding in large cities, traffic jams, competition for jobs, worry about the future,
any big changes in our lives, may cause stress.
Some British doctors have pointed out that
one of Britain?s worst waves of influenza happened soon after the new coins came into use.
Also if you have changed jobs or moved house in recent months you are more likely to fall ill than if you haven?t.
And more people commit suicide in times of inflation.
As with all illnesses, prevention is better than cure.
If you find you can?t relax, it is a sign of danger.
“When you?re taking work home, when you can?t enjoy an evening with friends,
when you haven?t time for outdoor exercise
—that is the time to stop and ask yourself whether your present life really suits you.”
Says one family doctor.
“Then it?s time to join a relaxation class,
or take up dancing, painting or gardening.”
Passage 56. The Reasons We Fight over Finance
When I started doing research for this column,
asking what sorts of money fights people have, every single couple said the same thing:
“Well, we don?t really fight about money.”
Right, right,right, I?d have to say,backing away from the flame of lies. “But we all have the occasional childish squabble, right?”
Even then people were hesitant.“Well... maybe,” they?d say.
One woman described how her husband took away her credit card one day.
Not that they fought about it.
Or take another couple I know.
I was at their house recently when the husband came home from work with a new drum set.
He hadn?t planed to drop 500 dollars on drums that day, he explained, as he unloaded the car, he just saw a classified ad and thought,why not? Although his wife appeared calm while I was there,
she told me later that they had a long “discussion” about the fact that they had agreed to save money to buy a house
—never mind their long-planned trip to Europe this summer— and why did he have to buy a drum set NOW?
What we have here is a failure to communicate.
“It?s a fairly common fight,
and it usually happens because the two people involved aren?t on the same page,”
says Barbara Steinmetz, a financial planner in Burlingame, Calif.
“One person thinks they have a shared goal of saving for a house, car or
retirement, and the other doesn?t.”
In fact, most fights occur not because of the amount of money spent but because of unspoken expectations that couples have
and are often afraid to talk about.
Sometimes it?s clashing styles, sometimes mismatched agendas, but people get so rooted in their own money views
that they can?t see that their partner simply has a different perspective. Steinmetz described one couple she advised who had this blind spot.
The husband first outlined his goals for investing, retirement savings, etc. Steinmetz then asked the wife about her goals.
“The husband was shocked to find out his wife had goals
—and they were different from his!” she says.
Passage 57 Washington’s Address to His Troops
The time is now near at hand which must probably determine whether Americans are to be freemen of slaves;
whether they are to have any property they can call their own; whether their houses and farms are to be pillaged and destroyed,
and themselves consigned to a state of wretchedness from which no human efforts will deliver them.
The fate of unborn millions will now depend, under God,
on the courage and conduct of this army.
Our cruel and unrelenting enemy leaves us only the choice of a brave resistance
or the most abject submission.
We have, therefore, to resolve to conquer or to die.
Our own, our country?s honor, calls upon us for a vigorous and manly exertion;
and if we now shamefully fail, we shall become infamous to the whole world.
Let us then rely on the goodness of our cause, and the aid of the Supreme Being,
in whose hands victory is, to animate and encourage us to great and noble actions.
The eyes of all our countrymen are now upon us,
and we shall have their blessings and praises,
if happily we are the instruments of saving them from the tyranny meditated against them.
Let us animate and encourage each other,
and show the whole world that a free man contending for liberty on his own ground
is superior to any slavish mercenary on earth.
Liberty, property, life, and honor are all at stake;
upon your courage and conduct rest the hopes of our bleeding and
insulted country;
our wives, children, and parents expect safety from us, only;
and they have every reason to believe that Heaven will crown with success so just a cause.
The enemy will endeavor to intimidate by show and appearance;
but remember, they have been repulsed on various occasions by a few brave Americans.
Their cause is bad — their men are conscious of it;
and if opposed with firmness and coolness on their first onset, with our advantage of works, and knowledge of the ground,
the victory is most assuredly ours.
Every good soldier will be silent and attentive—wait for orders, and reserve his fire until he is sure of doing execution.
Passage 58. Adolescence
Parents are often upset when their children praise the homes of their friends
and regard it as a slur on their own cooking,or cleaning, or furniture,
and often are foolish enough to let the adolescents see that they are annoyed.
They may even accuse them of disloyalty,
or make some spiteful remark about the friends? parents.
Such a loss of dignity and descent into childish behavior on the part of the adults
deeply shocks the adolescents,
and makes them resolve that in future they will not talk to their parents about the places or people they visit.
Before very long the parents will be complaining
that the child is so secretive and never tells them anything,
but they seldom realize that they have brought this on themselves.
Disillusionment with the parents, however good and adequate they may be
both as parent and as individuals, is to some degree inevitable. Most children have such a high ideal of their parents,
unless the parents themselves have been unsatisfactory,
that it can hardly hope to stand up to a realistic evaluation.
Parents would be greatly surprised and deeply touched
if they realized how much belief their children usually have in their character and infallibility,
and how much this faith means to a child.
If parents were prepared for this adolescent reaction,
and realized that it was a sign that the child was growing up
and developing valuable powers of observation and independent judgment,
they would not be so hurt,
and therefore would not drive the child into opposition by resenting and resisting it.
The adolescent, with his passion for sincerity,
always respects a parent who admits that he is wrong, or ignorant, or even that he has been unfair or unjust.
What the child cannot forgive is the parents' refusal to admit these charges
if the child knows them to be true.
Victorian parents believed that they kept their dignity
by retreating behind an unreasoning authoritarian attitude;
in fact they did nothing of the kind,
but children were then too cowed to let them know how they really felt. Today we tend to go to the other extreme,
but on the whole this is a healthier attitude both for the child and the parent.
It is always wiser and safer to face up to reality,
however painful it may be at the moment.
Passage 59. Work
It is physically impossible for a well-educated,intellectual,
or brave man to make money the chief object of his thoughts;
as physically impossible as it is for him to make his dinner the principal object of them.
All healthy people like their dinner,
but their dinner is not the main object of their lives.
So all healthyminded people like making money
—ought to like it and to enjoy the sensation of winning it;
but the main object of their lives is not money; it is something better than money.
A good soldier, for instance, mainly wishes to do his fighting well. He is glad of his pay—very properly so,
and justly grumbles when you keep him ten months without it;
still his main notion of life is to win battles, not to be paid for winning them.
So of doctors.
They like fees no doubt—ought to like them;
yet if they are brave and well educated,the entire object of their lives is not fees.
They, on the whole,desire to cure the sick,
and—if they are good doctors, and the choice were fairly put to them —would rather cure their patient and lose their fee than kill him and get it.
And so with all other brave and rightly trained men;
their work is first, their fee second, very important always,but still second.
But in every nation, there is a vast class of people who are cowardly, and more or less stupid. And with these people,
just as certainly the fee is first and the work second,
as with brave people the work is first and the fee second.
And this is no small distinction. It is the whole distinction.
It is the whole distinction in a man.
You cannot serve two masters; you must serve one or the other.
If your work is first with you, and your fee second, work is your master. Observe, then, all wise work is mainly threefold in character.
It is honest,useful, and cheerful.
I hardly know anything more strange than that you recognize honesty in play,
and do not in work.
In your lightest games you have always someone to see what you call “fair play”.
In boxing you must hit fair; in racing, start fair.
Your watchword is fair play; your hatred, foul play.
Did it ever strike you that you wanted another watchword also, fair work, and another hatred also, foul work?
Passage 60. Benjamin Franklin
Franklin?s life is full of charming stories which all young men should know
—how he peddled ballads in Boston, and stood, the guest of kings, in Europe;
how he worked his passage as a stowaway to Philadelphia,
and rode in the queen's own litter in France;
how he walked the streets of Philadelphia, homeless and unknown,
with three-penny rolls for his breakfast,and dined at the tables of princess, and received his friends in a palace;
how he raised a kite from a cow shed,
and was showered with all the high degrees the colleges of the world could give;
how he was duped by a false friend as a boy,
and became the friend of all humanity as a man;
how he was made Major General Franklin,only to resign because, as he said, he was no soldier,and yet helped to organize the army that stood before the trained troops of England and Germany.
This poor Boston boy, with scarcely a day?s schooling,
became master of six languages and never stopped studying;
this neglected apprentice tamed the lightning,
made his name famous,received degrees and diplomas from colleges in
both hemispheres,
and became forever remembered as“Doctor Franklin”,
philosopher, patriot, scientist,philanthropist and statesman.
Self-made,self-taught,self-reared, the candle maker?s son gave light to all the world;
the street ballad seller set all men singing of liberty;
the runaway apprentice became the most sought-after man of two continents,
and brought his native land to praise and honor him.
He built America—for what our Republic is today is largely due to the prudence,
the forethought, the statesmanship, the enterprise,the wisdom, and the ability of Benjamin Franklin.
He belongs to the world, but especially does he belong to America, as the nations honored him while living,
so the Republic glorifies him when dead,
and has enshrined him in the choicest of its niches
—the one he regarded as the loftiest—the hearts of the common people, from whom he had sprung and in their hearts Franklin will live forever. Passage 61 It’s Never Too Late to Change
Age is no criterion when it comes to changing your life.
In fact, it might be just the opposite.
The older we get, the more we must change.
Change is what keeps us fresh and innovative.
Change is what keeps us from getting stale and stuck in a rut.
Change is what keeps us young.
This is not easy.
When we are young it's easy to change and experiment with different things.
The older we get the more set in our ways we become.
We've found out what our comfort level is, and we all want to stay in it. We don't want to be risk takers anymore, because risk frightens us, and simply not changing seems so easy.
We must fight through this.
We must look fear straight in the eye and take it on.
We must tell ourselves that we have too much talent, too much wisdom, too much value not to change.
I believe that Jim, who is on my staff,
is one of the best assistant coaches in the country.
But I almost didn't hire him three years ago
because I thought that psychologically he was too "old,"
that he had lost the drive and passion that an assistant coach needs. Three years ago he was forty, and I thought
he might have spent too many Saturday afternoons at the country club, that he wasn't going to get in the trenches anymore,
like the younger assistant coaches do.
But Jim told me that he couldn't wait to get down in the trenches again. So I hired him, and he's been an integral part of our success.
There is a conventional wisdom in coaching that once you've been a head coach
you can't enthusiastically go back to being an assistant again
and still have the same passion as before.
Jim didn't buy into that.
He didn't let his "old age" get in his way.
He was ready when opportunity came calling.
He reestablished a work ethic second to none with the eagerness of a person right out of college.
And I'm thankful for what he did,
because he played such an essential role in our championship season. This is what we all must do.
We must realize that it's never too late to begin making changes that can transform our life.
Passage 62 The Price of Perfection
Gold may depreciate, stocks rise or fall,
and business values change so as to leave the market in panic,
but every man on the street or in the store knows that one value forever remains permanent, unvarying,
and that is character.
Every other asset may be swept away and success still achieved if this remain;
every other aid may be at its best
and failure only await him who lacks the wealth of character.
Character is that of which reputation is but the echo, often mistaken and misleading.
Character is the last, the ultimate, value of life.
It is the trend of the whole being towards the best.
It is the passion and power that holds one true despite all persuasion. It is the one thing worth having, because upon it all other values depend. This asset comes not to a man by accident.
He who is rich in character,
whose success in many ways is built upon his resources in this way, does not just simply happen to be good, true, and square.
There is a price to character;
it costs more than any other thing, for it is worth more than all other things.
Essentially it never is inherited,
but always acquired by processes often slow and toilsome and at great price.
If you would be perfect you must pay the price of perfection.
Unless the passion of life is this perfection it never will be your possession.
Dreams of ideal goodness only waste the hours in which it might have been achieved.
No man ever finds character in his sleep.
The education of the heart is a thing even more definite than the education of the head.
The school of character has an infinite variety of courses and an unending curriculum.
This does not mean that this prize of eternity falls
only to those who devote themselves wholly to self-culture,
to the salvation of their own souls.
The best lives have thought little of themselves,
but they have lived for the ends of the soul, to help men to better living, to save them from the things that blight and damn the soul.
Like the Leader of men they have found the life unending by laying down their lives,
paying the full price, selling all in order that right and truth and honour and purity,
love and kindness and justice might remain to man.
Passage 63. The Definition of a Gentleman
Hence it is, that it is almost a definition of a gentleman,
to say he is one who never inflicts pain.
This description is both refined and, as far as it goes, accurate. He is mainly occupied in merely removing the obstacles
which hinder the free and unembarrassed action of those about him;
and he concurs with their movements rather than takes the initiative himself.
His benefits may be considered as parallel to what are called comforts or conveniences
in arrangements of a personal nature:
like an easy chair or a good fire, which do their part in dispelling cold and fatigue,
though nature provides both means of rest and animal heat without them. He is never mean or little in his disputes, never takes unfair advantage, never mistakes personalities or sharp sayings for arguments or insinuates evil
which he dare not say out.
From a long-sighted prudence, he observes the maxim of the ancient sage,
that we should ever conduct ourselves towards our enemy as if he were one day to be our friend.
He has too much good sense to be affronted at insults,
he is too well employed to remember injuries, and too engaged to bear malice.
He is patient,tolerant, and resigned, on philosophical principles;
he submits to pain,because it is inevitable,to the death of family members, because it is irreparable,and to death, because it is his destiny. If he engages in controversy of any kind,
his disciplined intellect preserves him from the blundering discourtesy of better,
though less educated minds;
who, like blunt weapons,tear and hack instead of cutting clean, who mistake the point in argument,waste their strength on trifles, misconceive their adversary,
and leave the question more involved than they find it.
He may be right or wrong in his opinion, but he is too clear-headed to be unjust;
he is as simple as he is forcible, and as brief as he is decisive.
Nowhere shall we find greater candor, consideration, indulgence: he throws himself into the minds of his opponents,
he accounts for their mistakes.
He knows the weakness of human reason as well as its strength, its province and its limits.
Passage 64 Mirror Mirror — What Do I See?
A loving person lives in a loving world.
A hostile person lives in a hostile world.
Everyone you meet is your mirror.
Mirrors have a very particular function.
They reflect the image in front of them.
Just as a physical mirror serves as the vehicle to reflection,
so do all of the people in our lives.
When we love someone, it?s a reflection of loving ourselves.
Oftentimes, when we meet someone new, we feel as if we?ve known each other for a long time.
That feeling can come from sharing similarities.
We are comfortable because part of ourselves is being reflected. Just as the ?mirror? or other person can be a positive reflection,
it is more likely that we?ll notice it when it has a negative connotation. Frequently, when we dislike qualities in other people, ironically, it?s usually the mirror that?s speaking to us.
Example: Several years ago, I joined a friend who had invited several other friends as well.
One woman, ?Laura? continuously dominated the conversation.
It was particularly annoying as I felt there was little opportunity to get to know the other people.
It wasn?t until several weeks had passed
that I questioned and couldn?t understand why was I so disturbed by Laura?s behavior
as I didn?t have to be friends or spend more time with her.
Finally, it hit me! I saw aspects of those same traits in me.
I realized that the reason we met was for me to hold up the ?mirror? and see myself behaving in an unfavorable manner.
So I began questioning myself further each time I encountered someone that I didn?t particularly like.
Each time, I asked myself "What is it about that person that I don?t like?" And then "Is there something similar in me?”
In every instance, and sometimes I had to really get very introspective, I could see a piece of that quality in me.
At times we meet someone new and feel distant, disconnected, or disgusted.
Although we don?t want to believe it—and it?s not easy or desirable to look further
—it can be a great learning lesson to figure out what part of the person is being reflected in you.
It?s simply just another way to create more self-awareness.
Passage 65 Tomorrow Will Be a Better Day
I'm 16. The other night while I was busy thinking about important social issues,
like what to do over the weekend, I overheard my parents talking about my future.
My dad was upset—not the usual stuff that he and Mom worry about, like which college I'm going to, how far away it is from home and how much it's going to cost.
Instead, he was upset about the world his generation is turning over to mine.
He sounded like this: "There will be a pandemic that kills millions,
a devastating energy crisis, a horrible worldwide depression and a nuclear explosion set off in anger."
As I lay on the living room couch, starting to worry about the future my father was describing,
I found myself looking at some old family photos.
There was a picture of my grandfather in his uniform.
He was a member of the war class.
Next to his picture were photos of my great-grandparents.
Seeing those pictures made me feel a lot better.
I believe tomorrow will be better, not worse.
Those pictures helped me understand why.
I considered some of the awful things my grandparents and great-grandparents had seen in their lifetimes:
two world wars, killer flu, a nuclear bomb.
But they saw other things, too, better things:
the end of two world wars, the polio vaccine, passage of the civil rights laws.
I believe that my generation will see better things, too
—that we will witness the time when AIDS is cured and cancer is defeated;
when the Middle East will find peace, and the Cubs win the World Series—probably only once.
I will see things as inconceivable to me today as a moon shot was to my grandfather
when he was 16, or the Internet to my father when he was 16.
Ever since I was a little kid, whenever I've had a lousy day,
my dad would put his arm around me and promise me that "tomorrow will be a better day."
I challenged my father once, "How do you know that?"
He said, "I just do." I believed him.
As I listened to my Dad talking that night,
so worried about what the future holds for me and my generation,
I wanted to put my arm around him, and tell him what he always told me: "Don't worry Dad, tomorrow will be a better day."
Passage 66 Kindness of Strangers
Our son Owen was born just as Hurricane Katrina approached the Gulf Coast.
Two days later, as Katrina neared landfall, Owen began suffering seizures; he'd had a stroke.
I didn't follow the catastrophe on the Gulf Coast as closely as I might have,
but those weeks taught me some things about catastrophe and about the kindness of strangers.
All catastrophes are personal.
Some in the Gulf Coast sought survival; some sought to help others. Some prayed; some prayed upon others.
At the hospital, we watched our son Owen sleep.
Despite the tubes dripping and the monitors beeping, he still slept his baby sleep.
My wife asked for the pastor; I asked for the doctor.
She prayed for him. I held the CAT scan up to the light and searched for answers.
No one can know what you will feel or fear in a time of need, but I learned that in this, the most difficult time of my life,
the people our family depended upon most were people we had never met,
people who we would likely never see again—strangers.
We depended upon strangers, strangers who knew their duty was to help others.
We depended upon the nurses who cared so well for our son,
who cooed to him and caressed him, who watched me hold him through the night
and never seemed to notice how ugly a man is when he cries.
We depended upon the hostel that gave us a place to stay near the hospital,
upon the members of my union who believe caring for our child's health should not ruin us,
upon the doctors and clerks and ambulance drivers.
We depended upon a commitment made to helping others.
This commitment is a web that holds us together in times of need.
By the time we took Owen home, the worst effects of Katrina were evident.
I watched the images from the Gulf Coast, images of communities, lives and families whose fabric had been torn apart.
I thought of that web of strangers that had embraced my family in our time of need,
and that it is the most fortunate among us who are served best by it.
I can only hope this web will be strong enough, that it will be spun wide, that it will hold and care for many,
that we can all depend upon the kindness of strangers.
Passage 67 The Pain of Youth (Ⅰ)
It is the habit of the poets, and of many who are poets neither in vision nor in faculty,
to speak of youth as if it were a period of unshadowed gaiety and pleasure,
with no consciousness of responsibility and no sense of care.
The freshness of feeling, the delight in experience, the joy of discovery, the unspent vitality which welcomes every morning as a challenge to one's strength,
invest youth with a charm which art is always striving to preserve,
and which men who have parted from it remember with a sense of pathos; for the morning of life comes but once, and when it fades something goes which never returns.
There are ample compensations, there are higher joys and deeper insights and relationships;
but a magical charm which touches all things and turns them to gold, vanishes with the morning.
All this is true of youth, which in many ways symbolises the immortal part of man's nature,
and must be, therefore, always beautiful and sacred to him.
But it is untrue that the sky of youth has no clouds and the spirit of youth no cares;
on the contrary, no period of life is in many ways more painful. The finer the organisation and the greater the ability,
the more difficult and trying the experiences through which the youth passes.
George Eliot has pointed out a striking peculiarity of childish grief in the statement
that the child has no background of other griefs
against which the magnitude of its present sorrow may be measured. While that sorrow lasts it is complete, absolute, and hopeless,
because the child has no memory of other trials endured, of other sorrows survived.
In this fact about the earliest griefs lies the source also of the pains of youth.
The young man is an undeveloped power;
he is largely ignorant of his own capacity, often without inward guidance
towards his vocation;
he is unadjusted to the society in which he must find a place for himself. He is full of energy and aspiration,
but he does not know how to expend the one or realise the other. His soul has wings, but he cannot fly, because, like the eagle,
he must have space on the ground before he rises in the air.
Passage 68 The Pain of Youth(Ⅱ)
There is no test of character more severe or difficult to bear than the suspense of waiting.
The man who can act eases his soul under the greatest calamities;
but he who is compelled to wait, unless he be of hardy fibre, eats his heart out in a futile despair.
If the troops were compelled to halt under the relentless guns of masked batteries,
they would be caught up in the stir of charge.
It will lead to the demoralisation and scatter of the troop, which would result in great loss.
Now, the characteristic trial of youth is this experience of waiting at a moment
when the whole nature craves expression and the satisfaction of action. The greater the volume of energy in the man who has yet to find his
vocation and place,
the more trying the ordeal.
There are moments in the life of the youth
when it seems impossible to realise any of its dreams
and the splendour of the dreams filled the young soul with despair. The clearer the consciousness of the possession of the power,
the stronger the fear that he could not find ways to contribute to the society.
The reality of this crisis in spiritual experience
—the adjustment between the personality and the physical,
social, and industrial order in which it must find its place and task —is the measure of its possible painfulness.
His pain has its roots in his ignorance of his own powers and of the world.
He strives again and again to put himself in touch with organised work; he takes up one task after another in a fruitless endeavour to succeed. He does not know what he is fitted to do,
and he turns helplessly from one form of work for which he has no faculty
to another for which he has less.
His friends begin to think of him as a ne'er-do-well;
and, more pathetic still, the shadow of failure begins to darken his own
spirit.
And yet it may be that in this halting, stumbling, ineffective human soul, vainly striving to put its hand to its task,
there is some rare gift, some splendid talent,
waiting for the ripe hour and the real opportunity!
In such a crisis sympathetic comprehension is invaluable,
but it is rarely given,
and the youth works out his problem in isolation.
Passage 69 Failure Is a Good Thing
Last week, my granddaughter started kindergarten, and I wished her success.
I was lying.
What I actually wish for her is failure.
I believe in the power of failure.
Success is boring.
Success is proving that you can do something that you already know you can do,
or doing something correctly the first time, which can often be a problematic victory.
First-time success is usually a fluke.
First-time failure, by contrast, is expected; it is the natural order of things.
Failure is how we learn.
I have been told of an African phrase describing a good cook as "she who has broken many pots."
If you've spent enough time in the kitchen to have broken a lot of pots, probably you know a lot about cooking.
I once had a dinner with a group of chefs,
and they spent time comparing knife wounds and burn scars.
They knew how much credibility their failures gave them.
I earn my living by writing a daily newspaper column.
Each week I am aware that one column is going to be the worst column. I don't set out to write it; I try my best every day.
I have learned to cherish that column.
A successful column usually means that I am treading on familiar ground, going with the tricks that work or dressing up popular sentiments in fancy words.
Often in my inferior columns, I am trying to pull off something I've never done before,
something I'm not even sure can be done.
My younger daughter is a trapeze artist.
She spent three years putting together an act.
She did it successfully for years.
There was no reason for her to change the act- but she did anyway.
She said she was no longer learning anything new and she was bored. So she changed the act.
She risked failure and profound public embarrassment in order to feed her soul.
My granddaughter is a perfectionist.
She will feel her failures, and I will want to comfort her.
But I will also, I hope, remind her of what she learned,
and how she can do whatever it is better next time.
I hope I can tell her, though, that it's not the end of the world.
Indeed, with luck, it is the beginning.
Passage 70. Inaugural Speech
In your hands, my fellow citizens,more than mine,
will rest the final success or failure of our cause.
Since this country was founded, each generation of Americans has been summoned
to give testimony to its national loyalty.
The graves of young Americans who answered the call to service surround the globe.
Now the trumpet summons us again—not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need;
not as a call to battle, though in battle we are,
but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out,
rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation, a struggle against the common enemies of man:
tyranny, poverty,disease and war itself.
Can we forge against these enemies a grand and global alliance,North and South, East and West,
that can assure a fruitful life for all mankind?
Will you join in that historic effort?
In the long history of the world,
only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger.
I do not shrink from this responsibility—I welcome it.
I do not believe that any of us would exchange places with any other people or any other generation.
The energy, the belief, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor
will light our country and all who serve it
—and the glow from that fire can truly light the world.
And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you —ask what you can do for your country.
My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you,
but what together we can do for the freedom of man.
Finally, whether you are citizens of America or citizens of the world,
ask of us here the same high standards of strength and sacrifice which we ask of you.
With a good conscience our only sure reward,
with history the final judge of our deeds,
let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth God's work must truly be our own. Passage 71. Beauty Is Meaningless
A young man sees a sunset and,
unable to understand or to express the emotion that it rouses in him, concludes that it must be the gateway to a world that lies beyond. It is difficult for any of us in moments of intense aesthetic experience to resist the suggestion that we are catching a glimpse of a light
that shines down to us from a different realm of existence,different and, because the experience is intensively moving, in some way higher. And, though the gleams blind and dazzle,
yet they do convey a hint of beauty and serenity greater than we have known or imagined.
Greater too than we can describe, for language,
which was invented to convey the meanings of this world,
cannot readily be fitted to the uses of another.
That all great art has this power of suggesting a world beyond is undeniable.
In some moods,Nature shares it.
There is no sky in June so blue that it does not point forward to a bluer, no sunset so beautiful that it does not waken the vision of a greater beauty,
a vision which passes before it is fully glimpsed,
and in passing leaves an indefinable longing and regret.
But, if this world is not merely a bad joke,
life a vulgar flare amid the cool radiance of the stars,
and existence an empty laugh braying across the mysteries,
if these intimations of something behind and beyond are not evil humor born of indigestion,
or whimsies sent by the devil to mock and madden us,
if, in a word, beauty means something,yet we must not seek to interpret the meaning.
If we glimpse the unutterable,it is unwise to try to utter it,
nor should we seek to invest with significance that which we cannot grasp.
Beauty in terms of our human meanings is meaningless.
Passage 72 The Year of Wandering
Between the preparation and the work,
the apprenticeship and the actual dealing with a task or an art, there comes, in the experience of many young men,
a period of uncertainty and wandering which is often misunderstood and counted as time wasted,
when it is, in fact, a period rich in full and free development.
It is as natural for ardent and courageous youth to wish to know what is in life,
what it means, and what it holds for its children,
as for a child to reach for and search the things that surround and attract it.
Behind every real worker in the world is a real man,
and a man has a right to know the conditions under which he must live, and the choices of knowledge, power, and activity which are offered him. In the education of many men and women, therefore, there comes the year of wandering;
the experience of traveling from knowledge to knowledge and from occupation to occupation.
The forces which go to the making of a powerful man can rarely be adjusted and blended
without some disturbance of relations and conditions.
This disturbance is sometimes injurious,
because it affects the moral foundations upon which character rests;
and for this reason the significance of the experience in its relation to development
ought to be sympathetically studied.
The birth of the imagination and of the passions, the perception of the richness of life,
and the consciousness of the possession of the power to master and use that wealth,
create a critical moment in the history of youth,
—a moment richer in possibilities of all kinds than comes at any later period.
Agitation and ferment of soul are inevitable in that wonderful moment. There are times when agitation is as normal as is self-control at other and less critical times.
The year of wandering is not a manifestation of aimlessness, but of aspiration,
and that in its ferment and uncertainty youth is often guided to and finally prepared for its task.
Passage 73 Wake up Your Life
Years ago, when I started looking for my first job, wise advisers urged,
“Barbara, be enthusiastic! Enthusiasm will take you further than any amount of experience.”
How right they were! Enthusiastic people can turn a boring drive into an adventure,
extra work into opportunity and strangers into friends.
“Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson.
An enthusiastic attitude enables us to hang in there when the going gets tough.
It's the inner drive that whispers, “I can do it!” when others believe it can't be done.
We are all born with wide-eyed, enthusiastic wonder
—as anyone knows who has ever seen an infant?s delight at the jingle of keys
or the scurrying of a beetle.
It is this childlike wonder that gives enthusiastic people such a youthful air, whatever their age.
As poet and author Samuel Ullman once wrote,
“Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul.”
We need to live each moment wholeheartedly, with all our senses —finding pleasure in the fragrance of a back-yard garden,
the crayoned picture of a six-year-old, the enchanting beauty of a rainbow.
It is such an enthusiastic love of life that puts a sparkle in our eyes. Passage 74 Wild Flowers
Each spring brings a new blossom of wildflowers in the ditches along the highway I travel daily to work.
There is one particular blue flower that has always caught my eyes.
I've noticed that it blooms only in the morning hours, the afternoon sun is too warm for it.
Every day for approximately two weeks, I see those beautiful flowers. This spring, I started a wildflower garden in our yard.
I can look out of the kitchen window while doing the dishes and see the flowers.
I've often thought that those lovely blue flowers from the ditches would look great in that bed alongside other wildflowers.
Everyday I drove past the flowers thinking, “I'll stop on my way home and dig them.”
“Gee, I don't want to get my good clothes dirty...”
Whatever the reason, I never stopped to dig them.
My husband even gave me a folding shovel one year for my trunk to be used for that expressed purpose.
One day on my way home from work,
I was saddened to see that the highway department had mowed the ditches
and the pretty blue flowers were gone.
I thought to myself, “Way to go, you waited too long.
You should have done it when you first saw them blooming this spring.”
A week ago we were shocked and saddened to learn that
my oldest sister-in-law has a terminal brain tumor.
She is 20 years older than my husband and unfortunately,
because of age and distance, we haven?t been as close as we all would have liked.
I couldn?t help but see the connection between the pretty blue flowers and the relationship between my husband's sister and us.
I do believe that God has given us some time left to plant some wonderful memories
that will bloom every year for us.
And yes, if I see the blue flowers again,
you can bet I'll stop and transplant them to my wildflower garden. Passage 75 The Bread of Life
There are lives that have bread in abundance and yet are starved;
with barns and warehouses filled, with shelves and larders laden they are
empty and hungry.
No man need envy them; their feverish, restless whirl in the dust of publicity
is but the search for a satisfaction never to be found in things.
They are called rich in a world where no others are more truly, pitiably poor;
having all, they are yet lacking in all because they have neglected the things within.
The abundance of bread is the cause of many a man's deeper hunger.
Having known nothing of the discipline that develops life's hidden sources of satisfaction,
nothing of the struggle in which deep calls unto deep and the true life finds itself,
he spends his days seeking to satisfy his soul with furniture,
with houses and lands, with yachts and merchandise, seeking to feed his heart on things,
a process of less promise and reason than feeding a snapping turtle on thoughts.
It takes many of us altogether too long to learn
that you cannot find satisfaction so long as you leave the soul out of your reckoning.
If the heart be empty the life cannot be filled.
The flow must cease at the faucet if the fountains go dry.
The prime, the elemental necessities of our being are for the life rather than the body,
its house. But, alas, how often out of the marble edifice issues the poor emaciated inmate,
how out of the life having many things comes that which amounts to nothing.
The essential things are not often those which most readily strike our blunt senses.
We see the shell first.
To the undeveloped mind the material is all there is.
But looking deeper into life there comes an awakening to the fact and the significance of the spiritual,
the feeling that the reason, the emotions, the joys and pains
that have nothing to do with things, the ties that knit one to the infinite, all of which constitute the permanent elements of life.
Passage 76 An October Sunrise
I was up before the sunrise one October morning, and away through the wild and the woodland.
The rising of the sun was noble in the cold and warmth of it;
peeping down the spread of light, he raised his shoulder heavily over the edge of gray mountain
and wavering length of upland.
Beneath his gaze the dew-fogs dipped and crept to the hollow places, then stole away in line and column,
holding skirts and clinging subtly at the sheltering corners where rock hung over grass-land,
while the brave lines of the hills came forth,
one beyond other gliding.
The woods arose, like drapery of awakened mountains, stately with a depth of awe,
and memory of the tempests.
Autumn's mellow hand was upon them, as they owned already, touched with gold and red and olive,
and their joy towards the sun was less to a bridegroom than a father. Yet before the floating impress of the woods could clear itself, suddenly the gladsome light leaped over hill and valley,
casting amber, blue, and purple, and a tint of rich red rose,
according to the scene they lit on,
and the curtain flung around;
yet all alike dispelling fear and the cloven hoof of darkness,
all on the wings of hope advancing, and proclaiming, "God is here!"
Then life and joy sprang reassured from every crouching hollow; every flower and bud and bird had a fluttering sense of them,
and all the flashing of God's gaze merged into soft beneficence.
So, perhaps, shall break upon us that eternal morning, when crag and chasm shall be no more,
neither hill and valley, nor great ocean;
when glory shall not scare happiness, neither happiness envy glory;
but all things shall arise, and shine in the light of the Father's countenance,
because itself is risen.
Passage 77 The Fascinating Moonrise
There is a hill near my home that I often climb at night.
The noise of the city is a far-off murmur.
In the hush of dark I share the cheerfulness of crickets and the confidence of owls.
But it is the drama of the moonrise that I come to see.
For that restores in me a quiet and clarity that the city spends too freely. From this hill I have watched many moons rise.
Each one had its own mood.
There have been broad, confident harvest moons in autumn;
shy, misty moons in spring;
lonely, white winter moons rising into the utter silence of an ink-black sky
and smoke-smudged orange moons over the dry fields of summer. Each, like fine music, excited my heart and then calmed my soul. But we, who live indoors, have lost contact with the moon.
The glare of street lights and the dust of pollution veil the night sky. Though men have walked on the moon, it grows less familiar. Few of us can say what time the moon will rise tonight.
Still, it tugs at our minds.
If we unexpectedly encounter the full moon, huge and yellow over the horizon,
we are helpless but to stare back at its commanding presence.
And the moon has gifts to bestow upon those who watch.
I learned about its gifts one July evening in the mountains.
My car had mysteriously stalled, and I was stranded and alone.
The sun had set, and I was watching what seemed to be the bright-orange glow of a forest fire
beyond a ridge to the east.
Suddenly, the ridge itself seemed to burst into flame.
Then, the rising moon, huge and red and grotesquely misshapen
by the dust and sweat of the summer atmosphere, loomed up out of the woods.
Distorted thus by the hot breath of earth, the moon seemed ill-tempered and imperfect.
Dogs at nearby farmhouse barked nervously,
as if this strange light had wakened evil spirits in the weeds.
But as the moon lifted off the ridge it gathered firmness and authority. Its complexion changed from red, to orange, to gold, to impassive yellow. It seemed to draw light out of the darkening earth, for as it rose, the hills and valleys below grew dimmer.
By the time the moon stood clear of the horizon,
full-chested and round and of the colour of ivory,
the valleys were deep shadows in the landscape.
The dogs, reassured that this was the familiar moon, stopped barking. And all at once I felt a confidence and joy close to laughter.
The drama took an hour.
Moonrise is slow and serried with subtleties.
To watch it, we must slip into an older, more patient sense of time.
To watch the moon move inflexibly higher is to find an unusual stillness within ourselves.
Our imaginations become aware of the vast distance of space,
the immensity of the earth and the huge improbability of our own existence.
We feel small but privileged.
Moonlight shows us none of life?s harder edges.
Hillsides seem silken and silvery, the oceans still and blue in its light. In moonlight we become less calculating, more drawn to our feelings. Passage 78 Human Thought Grows Like a Tree
Human thought is not a firework, ever shooting off fresh forms and shapes as it burns;
it is a tree, growing very slowly—you can watch it long and see no movement
—very silently, unnoticed.
It was planted in the world many thousand years ago, a tiny, sickly plant. And men guarded it and tended it, and gave up life and fame to aid its growth.
In the hot days of their youth, they came to the gate of the garden and knocked,
begging to be let in, and to be counted among the gardeners.
And their young companions outside called to them to come back,
and play the man with bow and spear, and win sweet smiles from rosy lips,
and take their part amid the feast, and dance, not stoop with wrinkled brows, at weaklings' work.
And the passers by mocked them and called shame, and others cried out
to stone them.
And still they stayed there laboring, that the tree might grow a little, and they died and were forgotten.
And the tree grew fair and strong.
The storms of ignorance passed over it, and harmed it not.
The fierce fires of superstition soared around it;
but men leaped into the flames and beat them back, perishing, and the tree grew.
With the sweat of their brow men have nourished its green leaves. Their tears have moistened the earth about it.
With their blood they have watered its roots.
The seasons have come and passed, and the tree has grown and flourished.
And its branches have spread far and high, and ever fresh shoots are bursting forth,
and ever new leaves unfolding to the light.
But they are all part of the one tree—the tree that was planted on the first birthday of the human race.
The stem that bears them springs from the gnarled old trunk that was green and soft
when white-haired Time was a little child;
the sap that feeds them is drawn up through the roots
Passage 79．Learn to Live in the Present Moment
To a large degree, the measure of our peace of mind is determined by how much we are able to live in the present moment.
Irrespective of what happened yesterday or last year,
or what may or may not happen tomorrow, the present moment is where you are—always!
Without question,many of us have mastered the neurotic art
of spending much of our lives worrying about a variety of things—all at once.
We allow past problems and future concerns to dominate our present moments,
so much so that we end up anxious, frustrated,depressed, and hopeless. On the flip side, we also postpone our gratification, our stated priorities, and our happiness,often convincing ourselves that“someday” will be better than today.
Unfortunately, the same mental dynamics that tell us to look toward the future
will only repeat themselves so that “someday” never actually arrives. John Lennon once said,“Life is what?s happening while we?re busy making”,
our children are busy growing up, the people we love are moving away busy dying,
our bodies are getting out of shape, and our dreams are slipping away. In short, we miss out on life.
Many people live as if life were a dress rehearsal for some later date. It isn?t.
In fact, no one has a guarantee that he or she will be here tomorrow.
Now is the only time we have, and the only time that we have any control over.
When our attention is in the present moment, we push fear from our minds.
Fear is the concern over events that might happen in the future —we won?t have enough money, our children will get into trouble, we will get old and die, whatever.
To combat fear, the best strategy is to learn to bring your attention back to the present.
Mark Twain said,“I?ve lived through many terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.”
I don?t think I can say it any better.
Practice keeping your attention on the here and now.
Your efforts will pay great dividends.
Passage 80. Success Is a Choice
All of us ought to be able to brace ourselves for the predictable
challenges and setbacks
that crop up every day.
If we expect that life won?t be perfect,
we?ll be able to avoid that impulse to quit.
But even if you are strong enough to persist through the obstacle course of life and work,
sometimes you will encounter an adverse event that will completely knock you on your back.
Whether it?s financial loss, the loss of respect of your peers or loved ones, or some other traumatic event in your life,
these major setbacks leave you doubting yourself
and wondering if things can ever change for the better again.
Adversity happens to all of us, and it happens all the time.
Some form of major adversity is either going to be there or it?s lying in wait just around the corner.
To ignore adversity is to succumb to the ultimate self-delusion.
But you must recognize that history full of examples of men and women who achieved greatness despite facing hurdles so steep that
they easily could have crushed their spirit and left them lying in the dust. Moses was a stutterer, yet he was called on to be the voice of God.
Abraham Lincoln overcame a difficult childhood,depression, the death of two sons,
and constant ridicule during the Civil War to become arguably our greatest president ever.
Helen Keller made an impact on the world despite being deaf, dumb, and blind from an early age.
Franklin Roosevelt had polio.
There are endless examples.
These were people who not only looked adversity in the face
but learned valuable lessons about overcoming difficult circumstances and were able to move ahead.
Passage 81 My Declaration of Self-Esteem
I am me.
In the entire world, there is no one else exactly like me.
There are people who have some parts like me but no one adds up exactly like me.
Therefore, everything that comes out of me is authentically mine because I alone choose it.
I own everything about me—my body, including everything it does; my mind, including all my thoughts and ideas;
my eyes, including the images of all they behold;
my feelings, whatever they might be
—anger, joy, frustration, love, disappointment, excitement;
my mouth and all the words that come out of it
—polite, sweet and rough, correct or incorrect;
my voice, loud and soft; all my actions, whether they be to others or myself.
I own my fantasies, my dreams, my hopes, my fears.
I own all my triumphs and successes, all my failures and mistakes. Because I own all of me, I can become intimately acquainted with me. By so doing, I can love me and be friendly with me in all my parts. I can then make it possible for all of me to work in my best interests. I know there are aspects about myself that puzzle me,
and other aspects that I do not know.
But as long as I am friendly and loving to myself,
I can courageously and hopefully look for the solution of the puzzles and ways to find out more about me.
However I look and sound, whatever I say and do
and whatever I think and feel at a given moment in time is me. This is authentic and represents where I am at that moment in time. When I review later how I looked and sounded,
what I said and did, and how I thought and felt,
some parts may turn out to be unfitting.
I can discard that which is unfitting and keep that which proved fitting, and invent something new for that which I discarded.
I can see, hear, feel, think, say and do.
I have the tools to survive, to be close to others, to be productive,
to make sense and order out of the world of people and things outside of me.
I own me and therefore I can engineer me.
I am me and I am okay.
Passage 82. Youth
Youth is not a time of life; it is a state of mind;
it is not a matter of rosy cheeks, red lips and supple knees;
it is a matter of will, a quality of imagination,a vigor of the emotions; it is the freshness of the deep springs of life.
Youth means a temperamental predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over the love of ease.
This often exists in a man of 60 more than a boy of 20.
Nobody grows old merely by a number of years.
We grow old by deserting our ideals.
Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul. Worry, fear, self-distrust bows the heart and turns the spirit back to dust. Whether 60 or 16, there is in every human being?s heart the lure of wonder,
the unfailing childlike appetite of what?s next and the joy of the game of
living.
In the center of your heart and my heart there is a wireless station:
so long as it receives messages of beauty,hope, cheer, courage and power from men and from the infinite,
so long as you are young.
When the aerials are down, and your spirit is covered with snows of cynicism and the ice of pessimism,
then you are grown old, even at 20,
but as long as your aerials are up to catch waves of optimism, there is hope you may die young at 80.
Passage 83. Why I Want a Wife
I belong to that classification of people known as wives.
I am A Wife. And, not altogether incidentally,I am a mother.
Not too long ago a male friend of mine appeared on the scene fresh from a recent divorce.
He had one child, who is, of course, with his ex-wife.
He is looking for another wife.
As I thought about him while I was ironing one evening,
it suddenly occurred to me that I, too, would like to have a wife. Why do I want a wife?
I would like to go back to school so that I can become econmically
independent,
support myself, and if need be,support those dependent upon me. I want a wife who will work and send me to school.
And while I am going to school I want a wife to take care of my children. I want a wife who take care of my physical needs.
I want a wife who will keep my house clean.
I want a wife who cooks the meals, a wife who is a good cook.
I want a wife who will plan the menus, do the necessary grocery shopping,prepare the meals,
serve them pleasantly, and then do the cleaning up while I do my studying.
I want a wife who will care for me when I am sick
and sympathize with my pain and loss of time from school.
I want a wife who will not bother me with rambling complaints about a wife?s duties.
But I want a wife who will listen to me
when I feel the need to explain a rather difficult point I have come across in my course of studies.
And I want a wife who will type my papers for me when I have written them.
When I am through with school and have a job,
I want my wife to quit working and remain at home
so that my wife can more fully and completely take care of a wife?s duties.
If, by chance, I find another person more suitable as a wife than the wife I already have,
I want the liberty to replace my present wife with another one. Naturally, I will expect a fresh, new life;
my wife will take the children and be solely responsible for them so that I am left free.
My god, who wouldn?t want a wife?
Passage 84. The Modern Plato
The modern Plato, like his ancient counterpart
has an unbounded contempt for politicians and statesmen and party leaders who are not university men.
He finds politics a dirty game, and only enters them reluctantly
because he knows that at the very least he and his friends are better than the present gang.
Brought up in the traditions of the ruling classes,
he has a natural pity for the common people whom he has learnt to know as servants,
and observed from a distance at their work in the factory,
at their play in the parks and holiday resorts.
He has never mixed with them or spoken to them on equal terms,
but has demanded and generally received a respect to his position and superior intelligence.
He knows that if they trust him, he can give them the happiness which they crave.
A man of culture, he genuinely despises the self-made industrialist and newspaper-king:
with a modest professional salary and a little private income of his own, he regards money-making as vulgar and avoids all ostentation.
Industry and finance seem to him to be activities unworthy of gentlemen, although, alas some part in them.
An intellectual,he gently laughs at the superstitions of most Christians, but he attends church regularly because he sees the importance of organized religion
for the maintenance of sound morality among the lower orders,
and because he dislikes the skepticism and materialism of radical teachers.
His genuine passions are for literature and the philosophy of science and he would gladly spend all his time in studying them.
But the plight of the world compels his unwilling attention,
and when he sees that human stupidity and greed are about to plunge Europe into chaos
and destroy the most glorious civilization which the worlds has destroyed,
he feels that it is high time for men of good sense and good will
to intervene and to take politics out of the hands of the plutocrats of the Right
and the woolly-minded idealists of the Left.
Since he and his kind are the only representatives of decency combined with intelligence,
they must step down into the arena and save the masses for themselves. Passage 85. A Grain of Sand
Here is a story.
A participant in the long-distance race got his shoes filled with sand when he was crossing a beach.
He had to stop to get the sand out hastily before he resumed running.
Unfortunately a grain of sand remained rubbing the sole and became increasingly telling
so that each step meant a twinge of pain.
Reluctant to halt and get rid of the sand，
he continued to run in spite of the pain until he could stand no more. He dropped out of the contest just a few yards from the finishing line. As he managed to get out of the shoe painfully，
he was surprised to find the cause of his lasting torment was only a grain of sand.
It seems that the greatest obstacle on one?s way forward may not be a high mountain or a deep valley
but a grain of sand that is hardly visible.
To avoid blame on a minor fault one may tell a lie.
That adds a burden to a heavy heart and weighs it down.
In the days to come he will have to fabricate one falsehood after another to cover the lie he told and the fault he committed.
Thus he will never be able to free himself from lingering anxiety, worry and regret,
to the ignorance that all his sufferings originate in only a grain of sand —the first lie he told.
Passage 87. Motherly and Fatherly Love
Motherly love by its very nature is unconditional.
Mother loves the newborn infant because it is her child,
not because the child has fulfilled any specific condition,
or lived up to any specific expectation.
Unconditional love corresponds in one of the deepest longings, not only of the child, but of every human being;
on the other hand, to be loved because of one?s merit, because one
deserves it, always leaves doubt;
maybe I did not please the person whom I want to love me,
maybe this or that—there is always a fear that love could disappear.
Furthermore,“deserved” love easily leaves a bitter feeling that one is not loved for oneself,
that one is loved only because one pleases,
that one is, in the last analysis, not loved at all but used.
No wonder that we all cling to the longing for motherly love,
as children and also as adults.
The relationship to father is quite different.
Mother is the home we come from, she is nature, soil, the ocean; father does not represent any such natural home.
He has little connection with the child in the first years of its life,
and his importance for the child in this early period cannot be compared with that of mother.
But while father does not represent the natural world,
he represents the other pole of human existence;
the world of thought,of man-made things, of law and order, of discipline, of travel and adventure.
Father is the one who teaches the child, who shows him the road into the world.
Fatherly love is conditional love.
Its principle is “I love you because you fulfill my expectations, because you do your duty,because you are like me.”
In conditional fatherly love we find, as with unconditional motherly love, a negative and a positive aspect.
The negative aspect is the very fact that fatherly love has to be deserved, that it can be lost if one does not do to what is expected.
In the nature of fatherly love lies the fact that obedience becomes the main virtue,
that disobedience is the main sin—and its punishment the withdrawal of fatherly love.
The positive side is equally important.
Since his love is conditional, I can do something to acquire it, I can work for it;
his love is not outside of my control as motherly love is.
Passage 86 Three Days to See
Most of us take life for granted.
We know that one day we must die, but usually we picture that day as far in the future.
The days stretch out in an endless vista,
so we go about our petty tasks, hardly aware of our listless attitude toward life.
The same lethargy characterizes the use of all our faculties and senses. Only the deaf appreciate hearing, only the blind realize the manifold blessings that lie in sight.
I have often thought it would be a blessing if each human being were stricken blind and deaf
for a few days at some time during his early adult life.
Darkness would make him more appreciative of sight;
silence would teach him the joys of sound.
When walking the woods, I, who cannot see,
find hundreds of things to interest me through mere touch.
I feel the delicate symmetry of a leaf.
I pass my hands lovingly about the smooth skin of a silver birch, or the rough, shaggy bark of a pine.
In the spring I touch the branches of trees hopefully in search of a bud —the first sign of awakening Nature after her winter?s sleep.
I feel the delightful, velvety texture of a flower,
and discover its remarkable convolutions;
and something of the miracle of Nature is revealed to me.
Occasionally, if I am very fortunate,
I place my hand gently on a small tree and feel the happy quiver of a bird in full song.
I am delighted to have the cool waters of a brook rush thought my open
finger.
To me a lush carpet of pine needles or spongy grass is
more welcome than the most luxurious Persian rug.
To me the pageant of seasons is a thrilling and unending drama, the action of which streams through my finger tips.
If I can get so much pleasure from mere touch,
how much more beauty must be revealed by sight.
Suppose you set your mind to work on the problem of how you would use your own eyes
if you had only three more days to see.
If with the oncoming darkness of the third night you knew that the sun would never rise for you again,
how would you spend those three precious intervening days?
What would you most want to let your gaze rest upon?
I, naturally, should want most to see the things
which have become dear to me through my years of darkness.
You, too, would want to let your eyes rest on the things that have become dear to you
so that you could take the memory of them with you into the night that loomed before you.
Passage 88. Ambition
It may seem an exaggeration to say that ambition is the drive of society, holding many of its different elements together, but it is not an exaggeration by much.
Remove ambition and the essential elements of society seem to fly apart. Ambition is intimately connected with family,
for men and women not only work partly for their families;
husbands and wives are often ambitious for each other,
but harbor some of their most ardent ambitions for their children. Yet to have a family nowadays—with birth control readily available,
and inflation a good economic argument against having children—is nearly an expression of ambition in itself.
Finally,though ambition was once the domain chiefly of monarchs and aristocrats,
it has, in more recent times,increasingly become the domain of the middle classes.
Ambition and futurity—a sense of building for tomorrow—are inextricable.
Working, saving, planning—these, the daily aspects of ambition
—have always been the distinguishing marks of a rising middle class. The attack against ambition is not incidentally an attack on the middle class and what it stands for.
Like it or not, the middle class has done much of society?s work in America;
and it, the middle class, has from the beginning run on ambition. It is not difficult to imagine a world short of ambition.
It would probably be a kinder world:without demands, without abrasions,without disappointments.
People would have time for reflection.
Such work as they did would not be for themselves but for the collectivity.
Competition would never enter in.
Conflict would be eliminated, tension become a thing of the past. The stress of creation would be at an end.
Art would no longer be troubling, but purely entertaining in its functions. The family would become superfluous as a social unit,
with all its former power for bringing about neurosis drained away.
Life span would be expanded, for fewer people would die of heart attack or stroke caused by overwork.
Anxiety would be extinct.
Time would stretch on and on, with ambition long departed from the human heart.
Ah, how unbearably boring life would be!
Passage 89. Stress Prevention
Stress is a normal part of life and usually comes from everyday occurrences.
Here are some ways you can deal with everyday sources of stress. Eliminate as many sources of stress as you can.
For example, if crowds bother you, go to supermarket when you know the lines won?t be too long.
Try renting videotapes rather than going to crowded movie theaters. If you are always running late, sit down with a pencil and paper and see how you are actually allotting your time.
You may be able to solve your problem(and destress your life a bit) just by being realistic.
If you can?t find the time for all the activities that are important to you, maybe you are trying to do too much.
Again, make a list of what you do during the day and how much each activity takes.
Then cut back.
Avoid predictably stressful situations.
If a certain sport or game makes you tense (whether it?s tennis or bridge), decline the invitation to play.
After all, the point of these activities is to have a good time.
If you know you won?t, there?s no reason to play.
If you can?t remove the stress,remove yourself.
Slip away once in a while for some private time.
These quiet moments may give you a fresh perspective on your problems. Competing with others,whether in accomplishments, appearance, or possessions,
is an avoidable source of stress.
You might know people who do all they can to provoke envy in others. While it may seem easy to say you should be satisfied with what you have, it?s the truth.
Stress from this kind of jealousy is self?inflicted.
Labor-saving devices, such as cell phones or internet,
often encourage us to cram too many activities into each day.
Before you buy new equipment, be sure that it will really improve your life.
Be aware that taking care of equipment and getting it repaired can be stressful.
Try doing only one thing at a time.
For example, when you?re riding your exercise bike,
you don?t have to listen to the radio or watch television.
Remember, sometimes it?s okay to do nothing.
If you feel stress(or anything else) is getting the better of you, seek professional help—a doctor or psychologist.
Early signs of excess stress are loss of a sense of well-being
and reluctance to get up in the morning to face another day.
Passage 90. Old Friends, Good Friends
More than 30 years ago, when I took my first job in New York City, I found myself working with a number of young women.
Some I got to know just in passing, but others gradually became my friends.
Today, six of these women remain an important part of my life. They are more than simply friends, more even than close friends.
They are old friends, as indispensable as sunshine and more dear to me than ever.
These people share a long-standing history with me.
In fact, old friends are a lot like promises.
They put reliability into the uncertainty of life
and establish a reassuring link between the past, present,and future.
The attachment between friends who have known each other for many years is bound to be complex.
On occasion we are exceedingly close, and at other times one or both of us invariably step back.
Ebb and flow. Thick and thin.
How smoothly and gently we negotiate these hills and valleys
has everything to do with how well the friendship ages.
Sometimes events intervene in a way that requires us to rework the term of a relationship.
A friend starts a second career, let?s say, and suddenly has less free time. Another remarries,adding someone new to the equation.
Talk honestly and listen to each other to find out if the other?s needs are being met.
Renegotiating pays full tribute to life?s inevitable changes
and says that we deem our friendships worthy of preserving.
Old friends are familiar with the layers of our lives.
They have been there in the gloom and the glory.
Even so, there?s always room to know more about another person.
Of course, self-disclosure can make even old friends more vulnerable, so go slowly:
Confiding can open new doors, but only if we knock first.
Time is the prime commodity between old friends
—by this I mean the time spent doing things together.
Whether it?s face to face over a cup of coffee,
side by side while jogging, ear to ear over the phone, or via email and letters,
don?t let too much time go by without sharing your thoughts with each other.
Passage 91. What Every Writer Wants
I have known very few writers, but those I have known, and whom I respect,
confess at once that they have little idea where they are going
when they first set pen to paper.
They have a character, perhaps two;
they are in that condition of eager discomfort which passes for inspiration;
all admit radical changes of destination once the journey has begun;
one, to my certain knowledge,spent nine months on a novel about Kashmir,
then reset the whole thing in the Scottish Highland.
I never heard of anyone making an “outline”, as we were taught at school. In the breaking and remaking,in the timing, interweaving,beginning again,
the writer comes to discern things in his material which were not consciously in his mind when he began.
This organic process, often leading to moments of extraordinary self-discovery,
is of an indescribable fascination.
A blurred image appears; he adds a brushstroke and another, and it is gone;
but something was there, and he will not rest till he has captured it. Sometimes the passion within a writer outlives a book he has written. I have heard of writers who read nothing but their own books; like adolescents they stand before the mirror,
and still cannot understand the exact outline of the vision before them. For the same reason, writers talk endlessly about their own books,
digging up hidden meanings, super-imposing new ones, begging response from those around them.
Of course a writer doing this is misunderstood:
he might as well try to explain a crime or a love affair.
He is also, incidentally, an unforgivable bore.
This temptation to cover the distance between himself and the reader, to study his image in the sight of those who do not know him, can be his undoing:he has begun to write to please.
A young English writer made the pertinent observation a year or two back that the talent goes into the first draft, and the art into the drafts that follow.
For this reason also the writer, like any other artist,has no resting place, no crowd or movement in which he may take comfort,
no judgment from outside which can replace the judgment from within.
A writer makes order out of the anarchy of his heart;
he submits himself to a more ruthless discipline than any critic dreamed
of,
and when he flirts with fame, he is taking time off from living with himself,
from the search for what his world contains at its inmost point. Passage 92. Waves
Waves are the children of the struggle between ocean and atmosphere, the ongoing signatures of infinity.
Rays from the sun excite and energize the atmosphere of the earth, awakening it to flow, to movement, to rhythm, to life.
The wind then speaks the message of the sun to the sea and the sea transmits it on through waves
—an ancient, exquisite, powerful message.
These ocean waves are among the earth?s most complicated natural phenomena.
The basic features include a crest (the highest point of the wave),
a trough (the lowest point), a height (the vertical distance from the trough to the crest),
a wave length (the horizontal distance between two wave crests),
and a period (which is the time it takes a wave crest to travel one wave length).
Although an ocean wave gives the impression of a wall of water moving
in your direction,
in fact waves move through the water leaving the water about where it was.
If the water was moving with the wave, the ocean
and everything on it would be racing into the shore with obviously disastrous results.
An ocean wave passing through deep water causes a particle on the surface
to move in a roughly circular orbit,
drawing the particle first towards the advancing wave, then up into the wave,
then forward with it and then—as the wave leaves the particles behind —back to its starting point again.
From both maturity to death, a wave is subject to the same laws as any other “living” thing.
For a time it assumes a miraculous individuality that,
in the end, is reabsorbed into the great ocean of life.
The undulating waves of the open sea are generated by three natural causes:
wind, earth movements or shakes, and the gravitational pull of the moon and the sun.
Once waves have been generated,gravity is the force that drives them in a
continual attempt
to restore the ocean surface to a flat plain.
Passage 93. Nonviolent and Noncooperation Movements
In my opinion, the Indian struggle for freedom bears in its consequences not only upon India and England but upon the whole world.
It contains one-fifth of the human race.
It represents one of the most ancient civilizations.
It has traditions handed down from tens of thousands of years, some of which, to the astonishment of the world, remain intact.
No doubt the damages of time have affected the purity of that civilization as they have that of many other cultures and many institutions. If India is to revive the glory of her ancient past,
she can only do so when she attains her freedom.
The reason for the struggle having drawn the attention of the world I know
does not lie in the fact that we Indians are fighting for our liberty,
but in the fact the means adopted by us for attaining that liberty are unique and,
as far as history shows us, have not been adopted by any other people of whom we have any record.
The means adopted are not violence,not bloodshed,
not diplomacy as one understands it nowadays,
but they are purely and simply truth and nonviolence.
No wonder that the attention of the world is directed toward this attempt to lead a successful bloodless revolution.
Hitherto,nations have fought in the manner of the brute.
They have wreaked vengeance upon those whom they have considered to be their enemies.
We find in searching national anthems adopted by great nations that they contain curse upon the so-called enemy.
They have vowed destruction and have not hesitated to take the name of God
and seek divine assistance for the destruction of the enemy.
We in India have endeavored to reverse the process.
We feel that the law that governs brute creation is not the law that should guide the human race.
That law is inconsistent with human dignity.
I, personally,would wait, if need be,
for ages rather than seek to attain the freedom of my country through bloody means.
I feel in the innermost of my heart,
after a political career extending over an unbroken period of close upon thirty-five years,
that the world is sick unto death of blood spilling.
The world is seeking a way out, and I flatter myself with the belief that perhaps it will be the privilege of ancient land of India
to show the way out to the hungering world.
Passage 94 We Walk on the Moon
Distinguished Ladies and Gentlemen, it is with a great sense of pride as an American
and with humility as a human being that I say to you today
what no men have been privileged to say before: “We walk on the moon.” But the footprints at Tranquility Base belong to more than the crew of Apollo Ⅱ.
They were put there by hundreds of thousands of people across this country,
people in the government, industry and universities,
the teams and crews that preceded us, all who strived throughout the years with Mercury, Gemini and Apollo.
Those footprints belong to the American people and you, the representatives,
who accept and support, inevitable challenge of the moon.
And, since we came in peace for all mankind those footprints belong also to all people of the world.
As the moon shines impartially on all those looking up from our spinning earth
so do we hope the benefits of space exploration will be spread equally with a harmonizing influence to all mankind.
Scientific exploration implies investigating the unknown.
The result can never be wholly anticipated.
Charles Lindberg said, “Scientific accomplishment is a path, not an end; a path leading to and disappearing in mystery.”
Our steps in space have been a symbol of this country's way of life
as we open our doors and windows to the world to view our successes and failures
and as we share with all nations our discovery.
The Saturn, Columbia, and Eagle and the Extravehicular Mobility Unit have proved to Neil,
Mike and me that this nation can produce equipment of the highest quality and dependability.
This should give all of us hope and inspiration to overcome some of the more difficult problems here on earth.
The Apollo lesson is that national goals can be met where there is a strong enough will to do so.
The first step on the moon was a step toward our sister planets and ultimately toward the stars.
“A small step for a man,” was a statement of a fact,
“a giant leap for mankind,” is a hope for future.
What this country does with the lessons of Apollo apply to domestic problems,
and what we do in further space exploration programs will determine just how giant a leap we have taken.
Thank you.
Passage 95 Searching for a Win-Win Solution
Recently I have had a dilemma I'm trying to resolve, a weekend in the near future
where I have conflicting demands and values, and need to be in two places at the same time.
I have agonized over this decision because my intuition is not giving me a clear answer
and I haven't felt that there was a win-win solution.
If I do one thing, I'm letting down a bunch of people.
If I do the other, I'm also missing the mark.
Either way I feel like a loser, not a winner.
This morning I got an e-mail that directly addresses this dilemma:
A Thinking Test
You are driving along on a wild, stormy night.
You pass by a bus stop, and you see three people waiting for the bus:
1. An old lady who is sick and about to die.
2. An old friend who once saved your life.
3. The perfect man or woman you have been dreaming about.
Which one would you choose to pick up, knowing that there could only be one passenger in your car?
The candidate who was hired simply answered:
"I would give the car keys to my old friend, and let him take the lady to the hospital.
I would stay behind and wait for the bus with the woman of my dreams." Sometimes, we gain more if we are able to
give up our stubborn thought limitations and think outside the box.
If, like me, you are looking at a decision that makes you feel forced to choose between plan A or plan B,
and neither plan by itself seems like the right decision,
stretch your mind to consider plans C or D,
to a third option that solves the problem in a whole new way.
Believe that there is a solution you haven't yet thought of,
which will enable you to feel good about your choice, and then search for what it is.
You are not always the victim in life;
most of the time you are the victor looking at the situation from the
wrong view!
The view is yours to choose.
Passage 96 A Word for Autumn
Last night the waiter put the celery on with the cheese,
and I knew that summer was indeed dead.
Other signs of autumn there may be—the reddening leaf, the chill in the early-morning air,
the misty evenings—but none of these comes home to me so truly. There may be cool mornings in July;
in a year of drought the leaves may change before their time;
it is only with the first celery that summer is over.
I knew all along that it would not last.
Even in April I was saying that winter would soon be here.
Yet somehow it had begun to seem possible lately that a miracle might happen,
that summer might drift on and on through the months
—a final upheaval to crown a wonderful year.
The celery settled that.
Last night with the celery autumn came into its own.
A week ago I grieved for the dying summer.
I wondered how I could possibly bear the waiting—the eight long months
till May.
In vain to comfort myself with the thought that
I could get through more work in the winter undistracted by thoughts of cricket grounds and country houses.
In vain, equally, to tell myself that I could stay in bed later in the mornings.
Even the thought of after-breakfast pipes in front of the fire left me cold. But now, suddenly, I am reconciled to autumn.
I see quite clearly that all good things must come to an end.
The summer has been splendid, but it has lasted long enough.
This morning I welcomed the chill in the air;
this morning I viewed the falling leaves with cheerfulness;
and this morning I said to myself, “Why, of course, I?ll have celery for lunch.”
There is a crispness about celery that is of the essence of October. It is as fresh and clean as a rainy day after a spell of heat.
It crackles pleasantly in the mouth.
Moreover it is excellent, I am told, for the complexion.
One is always hearing of things which are good for the complexion, but there is no doubt that celery stands high on the list.
After the burns and freckles of summer one is in need of something. How good that celery should be there at one?s elbow.
Passage 97 The Folly of Anxiety
Half the people on our streets look as though life was a sorry business. It is hard to find a happy looking man or woman.
Worry is the cause of their woebegone appearance.
Worry makes the wrinkles; worry cuts the deep, down-glancing lines on the face;
worry is the worst disease of our modern times.
Care is contagious; it is hard work being cheerful at a funeral, and it is a good deal harder to keep the frown from your face
when you are in the throng of the worry worn ones.
Yet, we have no right to be dispensers of gloom;
no matter how heavy our loads may seem to be we have no right to throw their burden on others
nor even to cast the shadow of them on other hearts.
Anxiety is instability. Fret steals away force.
He who dreads tomorrow trembles today.
Worry is weakness.
The successful men may be always wide-awake, but they never worry. Fret and fear are like fine sand, thrown into life's delicate mechanism; they cause more than half the friction; they steal half the power. Cheer is strength.
Nothing is so well done as that which is done heartily,
and nothing is so heartily done as that which is done happily.
Be happy, is an injunction not impossible of fulfillment.
Pleasure may be an accident; but happiness comes in definite ways.
It is the casting out of our foolish fears that we may have room for a few of our common joys.
It is the telling our worries to wait until we get through appreciating our blessings.
Take a deep breath, raise your chest, lift your eyes from the ground, look up and think how many things you have for which to be grateful, and you will find a smile growing where one may long have been unknown.
Take the right kind of thought—for to take no thought would be sin—but take the calm,
unanxious thought of your business, your duties, your difficulties,
your disappointments and all the things that once have caused you fear, and you will find yourself laughing at most of them.
Passage 98 On Going a Journey
One of the pleasantest things in the world is going a journey:
but I like to go by myself.
I can enjoy society in a room;
but out of doors, nature is company enough for me.
I am then never less alone than when alone.
“The fields his study, nature was his book.”
I cannot see the wit of walking and talking at the same time.
When I am in the country I wish to vegetate like the country.
I am not for criticizing hedges and black cattle.
I go out for town in order to forget the town and all that is in it. There are those who for this purpose go to watering places,
and carry the metropolis with them.
I like more space and fewer obstacles.
I like solitude, when I give myself up to it, for the sake of solitude; nor do I ask for
“a friend in my retreat, whom I may whisper solitude is sweet.”
The soul of journey is liberty, perfect liberty, to think, feel, do, just as one pleases.
We go a journey chiefly to be free of all obstacles and all inconveniences; to leave ourselves behind, much more to get rid of others.
It is because I want a little breathing space to ponder on indifferent matters, where contemplation
“May plume her feathers and let grow her wings,
that in the various bustle of resort were all too ruffled, and sometimes impaired.”
I absent myself from the town for a while, without feeling at a loss the
moment I am left by myself.
Instead of a friend in a post chaise or in a carriage, to exchange good things with,
and vary the same stale topics over again, for once let me have a time free from manners.
Give me the clear blue sky over my head, and the green turf beneath my feet,
a winding road before me, and the three hours' march to dinner—and then to thinking!
It is hard if I cannot start some game on these lone heaths.
I laugh, I run, I leap, I sing for joy!
From the point of yonder rolling cloud I plunge into my past being, and revel there as the sun-burnt Indian plunges headlong into the wave that wafts him to his native shore.
Then long-forgotten things like “sunken wrack and sumless treasuries,” burst upon my eager sight, and I begin to feel, think, and be myself again. Instead of an awkward silence, broken by attempts at wit or dull commonplaces,
mine is that undisturbed silence of the heart which alone is perfect eloquence.
Passage 99. Blood, Toil, Sweat and Tears
In this crisis I think I may be pardoned if I do not address the House at any length today,
and I hope that any of my friends and colleagues or former colleagues who are affected by the political reconstruction
will make all allowances for any lack of ceremony with which it has been necessary to act.
I say to the House as I said to Ministers who have joined this government, I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, sweat and tears.
We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind.
We have before us many, many months of struggle and suffering.
You ask, what is our policy? I say it is to wage war by land, sea and air. War with all our might and with all the strength God has given us,
and to wage war against a monstrous tyranny never surpassed in the dark and unpleasant catalogue of human crime.
That is our policy.
You ask, what is our aim?
I can answer in one word.
It is victory. Victory at all costs—victory in spite of all terrors—victory, however long and hard the road may be, for without victory there is no survival.
Let that be realized.
No survival for the British Empire, no survival for all that the British Empire has stood for,
no survival for the urge, the impulse of the ages,
that mankind shall move forward toward his goal.
I take up my task in light heart and hope.
I feel sure that our cause will not be suffered to fail among men.
I feel entitled at this juncture, at this time, to claim the aid of all and to say,
“Come then, let us go forward together with our united strength.” Passage 100 My Perfect House
My house is perfect.
By great good fortune I have found a housekeeper no less to my mind, a low-voiced, light-footed woman of discreet age, strong and deft enough to render me all the service I require,
and not afraid of loneliness.
She rises very early.
By my breakfast-time there remains little to be done under the roof save dressing of meals.
Very rarely do I hear even a clink of crockery; never the closing of a door or window.
Oh, blessed silence!
My house is perfect.
Just large enough to allow the grace of order in domestic circumstance; just that superfluity of inner space, to lack which is to be less than at one's ease.
The fabric is sound; the work in wood and plaster tells of a more leisurely and a more honest age than ours.
The stairs do not creak under my step; I am attacked by no unkindly draught;
I can open or close a window without muscle-ache.
As to such trifles as the color and device of wall-paper, I confess my indifference;
be the walls only plain, and I am satisfied.
The first thing in one's home is comfort;
let beauty of detail be added if one has the means, the patience, the eye. To me, this little book-room is beautiful, and chiefly because it is home. Through the greater part of life I was homeless.
Many places have I lived, some which my soul disliked, and some which pleased me well;
but never till now with that sense of security which makes a home.
At any moment I might have been driven forth by evil accident, by disturbing necessity.
For all that time did I say within myself:
Some day, perchance, I shall have a home;
yet the "perchance" had more and more of emphasis as life went on,
and at the moment when fate was secretly smiling on me, I had all but abandoned hope.
I have my home at last.
This house is mine on a lease of a score of years.
So long I certainly shall not live;
but, if I did, even so long should I have the money to pay my rent and buy my food.
I am no cosmopolite.
Were I to think that I should die away from England, the thought would be dreadful to me.
And in England, this is the place of my choice; this is my home.