优美英文晨读

英语是目前世界上通用程度最高的语言,也是人们参与国际交流和竞争必备的技能。下面是我带来的每日英语晨读美文，欢迎阅读!

Causes Are People

by Susan Parker Cobbs

IT HAS NOT been easy for me to meet this assignment. In the first place, I am not a very articulate person, and then one has so many beliefs, changing and fragmented and transitory beliefs---besides the ones most central to our lives. I have tried hard to pull out and put into words my most central beliefs. I hope that what I say won’t sound either too simple or too pious.

I know that it is my deep and fixed conviction that man has within him the force of good and the power to translate force into life. For me, this means that a pattern of life that makes personal relationships more important. A pattern that makes more beautiful and attractive the personal virtues: courage, humility, selflessness and love. I used to smile at my mother because the tears came so readily to her eyes when she heard or read of some incident that called out these virtues. I don’t smile any more because I find I have become more and more responsive in the same inconvenient way to the same kind of story.

And so I believe that I both can and must work to achieve the good that is in me. The words of Socrates keep coming back to me: “The unexamined life is not worth living.” By examination we can discover what is our good and we can realize that knowledge of good means its achievement. I know that such self-examination has never been easy---Plato maintained that it was soul’s central search. It seems to me peculiarly difficult now. In a period of such rapid material expansion and such wide spread conflicts, black and white have become gray and will not easily separate.

There is a belief which follows this. If I have the potential of the good life within me and compulsion to express it, then it is a power and compulsion common to all men. What I must have for myself to conduct my search, all men must have: freedom of choice, faith in the power and the beneficent qualities of truth. What frightens me most today is the denial of these rights, because this can only come from the denial of what seems to me the essential nature of man. For if my conviction holds, man is more important than anything he has created and our great task is to bring back again into a subordinate position the monstrous superstructures of our society.

I hope this way of reducing our problems to the human equation is not simple an evasion of them. I don’t believe it is. For most of us it is the area in which we can work : the human area---with ourselves, with the people we touch, and through these two by vicarious understanding, with mankind. I believe this is the safest starting point. I watch young people these days wrestling with our mighty problems. They are much more concerned with them and involved in them than my generation of students ever was. They are deeply aware of the words “quality” and “justice” In their great desire to right wrong they are prone to forget that causes are people, that nothing matters more than people. They need to add to their crusades the warmer and more affecting virtues of compassion and love. And here again come those personal virtues that bring tears to the eyes.

One further word, I believe that the power of good within us is real and comes there from a source outside and beyond ourselves. Otherwise, I could not put my trust so firmly in it.

Keep the Innocent Eye

By Sir Hugh Casson

When I Accepted the invitation to join in "This I Believe," it was not-goodness knows-because I felt I had anything profound to contribute. I regarded it-selfishly, perhaps-as a chance to get my own ideas straight. I started, because it seemed simplest that way, with my own profession. The signposts I try to follow as an architect are these: to keep the innocent eye with which we are all born, and therefore always to be astonished; to respect the scholar but not the style snob; to like what I like without humbug, but also to train my eye and mind so that I can say why I like it; to use my head but not to be frightened to listen to my heart (for there are some things which can be learned only through emotion); finally, to develop to the best of my ability the best that lies within me.

But what, you may say, about the really big problems of life- Religion? Politics? World Affairs? Well, to be honest, these great problems do not weigh heavily upon my mind. I have always cared more for the small simplicities of life-family affection, loyalty of friends, joy in creative work.

Religion? Well, when challenged I describe myself as "Church of England," and as a child I went regularly to church. But today, though I respect churchgoing as an act of piety and enjoy its sidelines, so to speak, the music and the architecture, it holds no significance for me. Perhaps, I don't know, it is the atmosphere of death in which religion is so steeped that has discouraged me-the graveyards, the parsonical voice, the thin damp smell of stone. Even today a "holy" face conjures up not saintliness but moroseness. So, most of what I learned of Christian morality I think I really learned indirectly at home and from friends.

World Affairs? I wonder if some of you remember a famous prewar cartoon. It depicted a crocodile emerging from a peace conference and announcing to a huge flock of sheep (labeled "People of the World"), "I am so sorry we have failed. We have been unable to restrain your warlike ambitions." Frankly, I feel at home with those sheep-mild, benevolent, rather apprehensive creatures, acting together by instinct and of course very, very woolly. But I have learned too, I think, that there is still no force, not even Christianity, so strong as patriotism; that the instinctive wisdom with which we all act in moments of crisis-that queer code of conduct which is understood by all but never formulated-is a better guide than any panel of professors; and finally that it is the inferiority complex, usually the result of an unhappy or unlucky home, which is at the bottom of nearly all our troubles. Is the solution, then, no more than to see that every child has a happy home? I'm not sure that it isn't. Children are nearer truth than we are. They have the innocent eye.

If you think that such a philosophy of life is superficial or tiresomely homespun or irresponsible, I will remind you in reply that the title of this series is "This I Believe”-not "This I ought to believe," nor even "This I would like to believe”-but, "This I Believe."

Dreams Are the Stuff Life Is Made Of

By Carroll Carroll

I believe I am a very lucky man.

My entire life has been lived in the healthy area between too little and too much. I’ve never experienced financial or emotional insecurity, but everything I have, I’ve attained by my own work, not through indulgence, inheritance, or privilege.

Never having lived by the abuses of any extreme, I’ve always felt that a workman is worthy of his hire, a merchant entitled to his profit, an artist to his reward.

As a result of all this, my bargaining bump may be a little underdeveloped, so I’ve never tried to oversell myself. And though I may work for less than I know I can get, I find that because of this, I’m never so afraid of losing a job that I’m forced to compromise with my principles.

Naturally in a life as mentally, physically, emotionally, and financially fortunate as mine has been, a great many people have helped me. A few meant to, most did so by accident. I still feel I must reciprocate. This doesn’t mean that I’ve dedicated my life to my fellow man. I’m not the type. But I do feel I should help those I’m qualified to help, just as I’ve been helped by others.

What I’m saying now is, I feel, part of that pattern. I think everyone should, for his own sake, try to reduce to six hundred words the beliefs by which he lives—it’s not easy—and then compare those beliefs with what he enjoys—not in real estate and money and goods, but in love, health, happiness, and laughter.

I don’t believe we live our lives and then receive our reward or punishment in some afterlife. The life and the reward…the life and the punishment—these to me are one. This is my religion, coupled with a firm belief that there is a Supreme Being who planned this world and runs it so that “no man is an island, entire of himself…” The dishonesty of any one man subverts all honesty. The lack of ethics anywhere adulterates the whole world’s ethical content. In these—honesty and ethics—are, I think, the true spiritual values.

I believe the hope for a thoroughly honest and ethical society should never be laughed at. The most idealistic dreams have repeatedly forecast the future. Most of the things we think of today as hard, practical, and even indispensable were once merely dreams.

So I like to hope that the world need not be a dog-eat-dog jungle. I don’t think I’m my brother’s keeper. But I do think I’m obligated to be his helper. And that he has the same obligation to me.

In the last analysis, the entire pattern of my life and belief can be found in the words “do NOT do unto others that which you would NOT have others do unto you.” To say “Do unto others as you would have others DO unto you” somehow implies bargaining, an offer of favor for favor. But to restrain from acts which you, yourself, would abhor is an exercise in will power that must raise the level of human relationship.

“What is unpleasant to thyself,” says Hillel, “THAT do NOT unto thy neighbor. This is the whole law,” and he concluded, “All else is exposition.”