江苏友道木业
英语散文的发展历程十分曲折,散文大家风格多变,兼之中英语言个性殊异,若要成功地把英语散文大家的作品翻译到中文,既须了解英语散文发展的概况,又须注意保证气韵逻辑通畅,文气沛然,才能传神译出,曲尽其妙,令汉语读者获得相同或相近的审美感受。下面我为大家带来英语短篇散文精选，欢迎大家阅读!
英语短篇散文精选：童真记趣
Oh God! I think I was about seven and half when my sisters and I pulled this stupid stunt. I remember watching television with them and the show on happened to be our favorite program to watch. All of a sudden we heard my brother, Chris, yelling from the backyard. So we all headed out there to see what happened. When we finally located him, he was in a tree hanging from the highest tree branch. Crying, he explained to us that he had climbed up the tree and couldn't get down. We thought, okay, one of us should climb up and get him off, but we couldn't manage to get him moving down.
It was then my youngest sister, Ka, who was five and a half at the time had seen a similar situation. She suggested we grab a sheet, hold it under the branch Chris was hanging off of, and tell him to drop so we can catch him. My other sister, Yams, who is one year younger than me, peered at me to confirm the idea and I said "Yeah, let's try that".
So we grabbed a sheet from the closet and went to hold it beneath the tree. Now mind you, the ages holding this blanket were ranging from seven and a half to five and a half, thus the sheet was probably being held up to our waist and also close to touching the ground. But we were confident it could work.
We looked up to Chris and he looked down at us a bit hesitant. I don't blame him the poor guy. It was then we told him to let go and to fall on his back. Chris looked at me and asked "Are you sure I'll land on the blanket?" Now, my brother at the age of four, had a cute squeaky voice. But because of a problem at birth with his tongue being a bit attached to the mouth, it came out more like this, "Ah you sho awill lan on da blanked?", "Yup!", I told him, "We're sure!" and he let go.
Now when I think about Chris letting go of that branch, I think of his faith in me and my sisters and I also think how stupid he was to trust us, cause when that boy let go he was in for a big surprise. Chris fell right through that sheet and landed right on his stomach. And no matter how tight we held on to the sheet, he still managed to get through.
We were shocked and a bit worried and we looked at the ground where he landed. This tiny seventy pound boy had made a hole right through the sheet and landed. He was positioned like one of those chalk drawings you find after a homicide, with one arm near the head another to the side and the knee bent a bit. We might as well have drawn an outline because he wasn't moving. So we bent down to check if he was still alive and when we asked him if he was okay he uttered these five words… "Ah stee hi da flow" in other words, "I still hit the floor!" Poor little man! But before you condemn us, Chris is fourteen now and he still bugs us about it, any tree he climbs he gets down on his own and, strangely, he wants to be a fireman when he grows up. Now he can write that he had personal experience about jumping and catching. See, no harm done…
英语短篇散文 精选 ：人生的意义
Ready or not, some day it will all come to an end. There will be no more sunrises, no days, no hours or minutes. All the things you collected, whether treasured or forgotten, will pass to someone else.
Your wealth, fame and temporal power will shrivel to irrelevance. It will not matter what you owned or what you were owed.
Your grudges, resentments, frustrations, and jealousies will finally disappear.
So, too, your hopes, ambitions, plans, and to-do lists will all expire. The wins and losses that once seemed so important will fade away.
It won't matter where you came from, or on what side of the tracks you lived.
It won't matter whether you were beautiful or brilliant. Your gender, skin color, ethnicity will be irrelevant.
So what will matter? How will the value of your days be measured?
What will matter is not what you bought, but what you built; not what you got, but what you gave.
What will matter is not your success, but your significance.
What will matter is not what you learned, but what you taught.
What will matter is every act of integrity, compassion, courage and sacrifice that enriched, empowered or encouraged others to emulate your example.
What will matter is not your competence, but your character.
What will matter is not how many people you knew, but how many will feel a lasting loss when you're gone.
What will matter is not your memories, but the memories of those who loved you.
What will matter is how long you will be remembered, by whom and for what.
Living a life that matters doesn't happen by accident.
It's not a matter of circumstance but of choice.
Choose to live a life that matters.
英语短篇散文 精选 ：感谢的快乐
In our life, we have rarely expressed our gratitude to the one who’d lived those years with us. In fact, we don’t have to wait for anniversaries to thank the ones closet to us—the ones so easily overlooked. If I have learned anything about giving thanks, it is this: give it now! while your feeling of appreciation is alive and sincere, act on it. Saying thanks is such an easy way to add to the world’s happiness.
Saying thanks not only brightens someone else’s world, it brightens yours. If you’re feeling left out, unloved or unappreciated, try reaching out to others. It may be just the medicine you need.
Of course, there are times when you can’t express gratitude immediately. In that case don’t let embarrassment sink you into silence-speak up the first time you have the chance.
Once a young minister, Mark Brian, was sent to a remote parish of Kwakiutl Indians in British Columbia. The Indians, he had been told, did not have a word for thank you. But Brian soon found that these people had exceptional generosity. Instead of saying thanks, it is their custom to return every favor with a favor of their own, and every kindness with an equal or superior kindness. They do their thanks.
I wonder if we had no words in our vocabulary for thank you, would we do a better job of communicating our gratitude? Would we be more responsive, more sensitive, more caring?
端木青烟
经典的文字阅读总能给我们带来诸多的感受，以下是我整理的世界经典短篇英语散文，欢迎参考阅读！
Anonymous
All the wisdom of the ages, all the stories that have delighted mankind for centuries, are easily and cheaply available to all of us within the covers of bo oks but we must know how to avail ourselves of this treasure and how to get the most from it. The most unfortunate people in the world are those who have never discovered how satisfying it is to read good books.
I am most interested in people, in them and finding out about them. Some of the most remarkable people I've met existed only in a writer's imagination, then on the pages of his book, and then, again, in my imagination. I've found in boo ks new friends, new societies, new words.
If I am interested in people, others are interested not so much in who as i n how. Who in the books includes everybody from science fiction superman two hun dred centuries in the future all the way back to the first figures in history. H ow covers everything from the ingenious explanations of Sherlock Holmes to the d iscoveries of science and ways of teaching mannner to children.
Reading is pleasure of the mind, which means that it is a little like a sport: your eagerness and knowledge and quickness make you a good reader. Reading is fun, not because the writer is telling you something, but because it makes your mind work. Your own imagination works along with the author's or even goes beyo nd his. Your experience, compared with his, brings you to the same or different conclusions, and your ideas develop as you understand his.
Every book stands by itself, like a one family house, but books in a librar y are like houses in a city. Although they are separate, together they all add u p to something, they are connected with each other and with other cities. The sa me ideas, or related ones, turn up in different places; the human problems that repeat themselves in life repeat themselves in literature, but with different so lutions according to different writings at different times. Books influence each other; they link the past, the present and the future and have their own genera tions, like families. Wherever you start reading you connect yourself with one o f the families of ideas, and in the long run, you not only find out about the wo rld and the people in it; you find out about yourself, too.
Reading can only be fun if you expect it to be. If you concentrate on books somebody tells you you “ought” to read, you probably won't have fun. But if you put down a book you don't like and try another till you find one that means som ething to you, and then relax with it, you will almost certainly have a good tim e — and if you become, as a result of reading, better, wiser, kinder, or more g entle, you won't have suffered during the process.
John Lubbock
Books are to mankind what memory is to the individual. They contain the hist ory of our race, the discoveries we have made, the accumulated knowledge and exp erience of ages; they picture for us the marvels and beauties of nature; help us in our difficulties, comfort us in sorrow and in suffering, change hours of wea riness into moments of delight, store our minds with ideas, fill them with good and happy thoughts, and lift us out of and above ourselves.
When we read we may not only be kings and live in palaces, but, what is far better, we may transport ourselves to the mountains or the seashore, and visit t he most beautiful parts of the earth, without fatigue, inconvenience, expense. P recious and priceless are the blessing, which the books scatter around our daily paths. We walk, in imagination, with the noblest spirits, through the most subl ime and enchanting regions.
Macaulay had wealth and fame, rank and power, and yet he tells us in his bio graphy that he owed the happiest hours of his life to books. In a charming lette r to a little girl, he says: “If any one would make me the greatest king that e ver 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 garret with plent y of books than a king who did not love reading.”
Arnold Bennett
The appearance today of the first volume of a new edition of Boswell's Johns on, edited by Augustine Birrell, reminds me once again that I have read but litt le of that work. Does there, I wonder, exist a being who has read all, or approx imately all, that the person of average culture is supposed to have read, and th at not to have read is a social sin? If such a being does exist, surely he is an old, a very old man, who has read steadily that which he ought to have read 16 hours a day, from early infancy.
I cannot recall a single author of whom I have read everything — even of Ja ne Austen. I have never seen Susan and The Watsons, one of which I have been tol d is superlatively good. Then there are large tracts of Shakespeare, Bacon, Spen ser, nearly all Chaucer, Congreve, Dryden, Pope, Swift, Sterne, Johnson, Scott, Coleridge, Shelley, Byron, Edgeworth, Ferrier, Lamb, Leigh Hunt, Wordsworth (nea rly all), Tennyson, Swinbume, and Brontes, George Eliot, W. Morris, George Mered ith, Thomas Hardy, Savage Landor, Thackeray, Carlyle—in fact every classical au thor and most good modern authors, which I have never even overlooked. A list of the masterpieces I have not read would fill a volume. With only one author can I call myself familiar, Jane Austen. With Keats and Stevenson, I have an acquain tance. So far of English. Of foreign authors I am familiar with Maupassant and the Goncourts. I have yet to finish Don Quixote!
Nevertheless I cannot accuse myself of default. I have been extremely fond o f reading since I was 20, and since I was 20 I have read practically nothing (sa ve professionally, as a literary critic) but what was “right”. My leisure has b een moderate, my desire strong and steady, my taste in selection certainly above the average, and yet in 10 years I seem scarcely to have made an impression upo n the intolerable multitude of volumes which “everyone is supposed to have read ”.
Alfred North Whitehead
Education is the acquisition of the art of the utilization of knowledge.This is an art very, difficult to impart.Whenever a text book is written of real ed ucational worth, you may be quite certain that some reviewer will say that it will be difficult to teach from it. Of course it will be difficult to teach from it. If it were easy, the book ought to be burned; for it cannot be educational. I n education, as elsewhere, the broad primrose path leads to a nasty place. This evil path is represented by a book or a set of lectures which will practically e nable the student to learn by heart all the questions likely to be asked at the next external examination. And I may say. in passing that no educational system is possible unless every question, directly asked of a pupil at any examination is either framed or modified by the actual teacher of that pupil in that subject …
We now return to my previous point, that theoretical ideas should always fin d important applications within the pupil’s curriculum. This is not an easy doc trine to apply, but a very hard one. It contains within itself the problem of ke eping knowledge alive, of preventing it from becoming inert, which is the centra l problem of all education.
…
I appeal to you, as practical teachers. With good discipline, it is always p ossible to pump into the minds of a class a certain quantity of inert knowledge. You take a text book and make them learn it. So far, so good. The child then k nows how to solve a quadratic equation. But what is the point of teaching a chil d to solve a quadratic equation? There is a traditional answer to this question. It runs thus: The mind is an instrument, you first sharpen it, and then use it; the acquisition of the power of solving a quadratic equation is part of the pro cess of sharpening the mind. Now there is just enough truth in this answer to ha ve made it live through the ages. But for all its half truth, it embodies a rad ical error which bids fair to stifle the genius of the modern world. I do not kn ow who was first responsible for this analogy of the mind to a dead instrument. For aught I know, it may have been one of the seven wise men of Greece, or a com mittee of the whole lot of them. Whoever was the originator, there can be no dou bt of the authority which it has acquired by the continuous approval bestowed up on it by eminent persons.But whatever its weight of authority, whatever the high approval which it can quote, I have no hesitation in denouncing it as one of the most fatal, erroneous, and dangerous conceptions ever introduced into the theo ry of education. The mind is never passive; it is a perpetual activity, delicate , receptive, responsive to stimulus.You cannot postpone its life until you have sharpened it. Whatever interest attaches to your subject matter must be evoked hele and now; whatever powers you are strengthening in the pupil, must be exe rcised here and now; whatever possibilities of mental life your teaching should impart, must be exhibited here and now.That is the golden rule of education, and a very difficult rule to follow.
The difficulty is just this: the apprehension of general ideas, intellectual habits of mind, and pleasurable interest in mental achievement can be evoked by no form of words, however accurately adjusted. All practical teachers know that education is a patient process of the mastery of details, minute by minute, hou r by hour, day by day.There is no royal roads to learning through an airy path o f brilliant generalizations.There is a proverb about the difficulty of seeing th e wood because of the trees. That difficulty is exatly the point which I am enfo rcing. The problem of education is to make the pupil see the wood by means of th e trees.
…
Again, there is not one course of study which merely gives general culture, and another which gives special knowledge. The subjects pursued for the sake of a general education are special subjects specially studied; and, on the other ha nd, one of the ways of encouraging general mental activity is to foster a specia l devotion. You may not divide the seamless coat of learning. What education has to impart is an intimate sense for the power of ideas, for the beauty of ideas, and for the structure of ideas together with a particular body of knowledge whi ch has peculiar reference to the life of the being possessing it.
The appreciation of the structure of ideas is that side of a cultured mind w hich can only grow under the influence of a special study. I mean that eye for t he whole chess board, for the bearing of one set of ideas on another.Nothing bu t a special study can give any appreciation for the exact formulation of general ideas, for their relations when formulated, for their service in the comprehens ion of life. A mind so disciplined should be both more abstract and more concret e. It has been trained in the comprehension of abstract thought and in the analy sis of facts.On Education
