1
1. Children will not remember you for the materials things you provided but for the feeling that you cherished them.
What is important to a child is not the material things that he/she is given, but the feeling of being loved. Parental love will accompany a child for the rest of his/her life
2. Perhaps the greatest social service that can be rendered by anybody to the country and to mankind is to bring up a family.
Raising a healthy family is perhaps the most important service that a grown-up citizen can offer to his/her country and to humanity in general.
3. Many things we can wait, the child cannot. Now is the time his bones are formed, his mind developed. To him we cannot say tomorrow, his name is today.
Parents may have a lot of things to do, but looking after a child should be the top priority. This is because the child is right in the process of physical and mental growth. We cannot delay our attention to him/her even for one day.
2
1. A positive attitude will have positive results because attitudes are contagious.
If you take a healthy attitude--- looking at the positive bright side of things, this attitude will have good results because the good influence of positive attitude gets passed on to the other.
2. I had the blues because I had no shoes until upon the street I met a man who had no feet.
I felt depressed because I had no shoes. But this unhappiness of mine disappeared when I saw a man without feet in the street.
3. Love what you do. Believe in your instincts. And you’d better be able to pick yourself up and brush yourself off every day. While life is not always fair, it is manageable. It is a matter of attitude and confidence.
Love what you do. Believe in your innate capabilities. And you’d better be able to encourage and refresh yourself and get rid of the bad feeling every day. Though there may be unfairness in life now and then, life can still be managed and controlled. What matters is how you look at it and whether you believe in yourself.
3
◆ As the soil, however rich it may be, cannot be productive without cultivation, so the mind
without culture can never produce good fruit. ( Seneca )
Education is very important for one’s self-development. An uneducated person will not have a bright future, no matter how much potential he may have.
◆ The things taught in schools and colleges are not an education, but the means to an education.
( Ralph Waldo Emerson )
What is important of the education in schools and colleges is that it teaches not what to learn but how to learn.
◆ Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you gain at one end you lose
at the other. It’s like feeding a dog on his own tail. It won’t fatten the dog. ( Mark Twain ) The fewer schools the country builds the more prisons it’ll have to provide. A country will not be prosperous without sufficient education for its people.
4
1. The purpose of work is to remove those who are living from a state of wretchedness and lead them into a state of blessedness. (Dante )
Work can help people get out of unpleasant situations and refresh them with happiness.
2. Work is, by its very nature, about violence to their spirit as well as the body: it’s above all about daily humiliations; it’s about a search for daily meaning a well as daily bread; for recognition as well as cash; for astonishment rather than torpor. In short, for a short of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying… (Studs Terkel)
The nature of work involves both physical and spiritual struggles. Beyond all other considerations, work is about constant embarrassment and shame you feel about yourself every day. Work is a two-sided thing; on the hand, one has to work to make money and maintain his/her livelihood; on the other, one gains spiritual delight and social recognition by working. Work is less boring than fascinating oneself. To sum up, the purpose of work is to search for a meaningful life rather than to go through a routine and mechanical one.
3. My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future’s sakes.
The purpose of my life is to combine what I enjoy doing with what I need to do for a living. It is ideal that we enjoy what we need to do and this is what we should pursue in our whole life. Background information relevant to the texts
5
1. Love is the emblem of eternity; it confounds all notion of time. (Anna Louise de Stael)Love is everlasting; it defeats any concept of time.
2. Honor thy mother and father is not only an excellent commandment but good public.
To respect one’s parents is not only a good religious rule to obey, but also a good public policy to implement.
3. Most of our other beautiful things in life come by twos and threes, by dozens and hundreds. Plenty of roses, stars, sunsets, rainbows, brothers and sisters, aunts and cousins, but only one mother- in the whole world.
Most of the things in life don’t come alone. For example we can have lots of roes, stars, rainbows, brothers and sisters, aunts and cousins, but we can have only one mother in the whole world who is the most beautiful thing in our lives.
6
1. To succeed… you need to find something to hold on to, something to motivate you, something to inspire you.
Setting in objective is an important step towards success as you will strive to achieve it
2. A man of character finds a special attractiveness in difficulty, since it is only coming to grips with difficulty that he can realize his potentialities.
Those with qualities such as courage value difficulty, for by coping with difficulty, they can understand themselves better and thus see more clearly how much potential they have.
3. No pain that we suffer, no trial that we experience is wasted. It ministers to our education, to the development of such qualities as patience, faith, fortitude, and humility.
Every suffering that we experience is worthwhile and will pay off because it teaches us something and fosters our qualities such as patience, confidence, perseverance, and modesty.
7
1. Reflect upon your present blessings, of which every man has many--- not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some. (Charles Dickens )
We all have many good things that happen to us, as well as some undesirable ones, Think about those good things rather than those bad ones.
2. We seldom think of what we have but always of what we lack. Yes, the tendency to “seldom think of what we have but always of what we lack” is the greatest tragedy on earth. It has probably caused more misery than all the wars and diseases in history. (Arthur Schopenhauer )
We seldom think of what we already have but always of what we don’t have. This kind of thought is the saddest in the world. It may have caused more pain than all the wars and illnesses have done in human history.
3. The perfect no-stress environment is the grave. When we change our perception we gain control. The stress becomes a challenge, not a threat. When we commit to action, to actually doing something rather than feeling trapped by events, the stress in our life becomes manageable. (Greg Anderson )
Everyone is under some kind of stress, except when dead. Instead of taking stress as a threat, we should adopt the right attitude about it---- it is nothing but a challenge. When we actually start to act, we will find that stress is not that horrible at all.
8
1. A hero is no brave than an ordinary man, but he is braver five times longer.
An ordinary person has the same courage that a hero possesses, but a hero’s courage can last much longer than that of an ordinary person.
2. The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.
To evaluate a person is not to look at him / her in times of comfort, but in times of difficult and conflict.
3. There are thousands upon thousands of unsung heroes whose names will never be known. Without them, we wouldn’t be where we are. Without them, we cannot get to where we are going and must go.
There are numerous heroes whom we have no chance to honor and whose names we will never get to know. Without them, we would not be in our present position. Without them, we cannot reach our future goal and our ultimate destination