经典美文背诵

1 Life Is To Be Whole Once, a circle missed a wedge. The circle wanted to be whole，so it went around looking for its missing piece．But because it was incomplete and therefore could roll only very slowly，it admired the flowers along the way．It chatted with worms．It enjoyed the sunshine．It found lots of different pieces，but none of them fit．So it left them all by the side of the road and kept on searching．Then one day the circle found a piece that fit perfectly．It was so happy．Now it could be whole，with nothing missing．It incorporated the missing piece into itself and began to roll．Now that it was a perfect circle，it could roll very fast，too fast to notice the flowers or talking to the worms．When it realized how different the world seemed when it rolled so quickly，it stopped，left its found piece by the side of the road and rolled slowly away． The lesson of the story，I suggested，was that in some strange sense we are more whole when we are missing something．The man who has everything is in some ways a poor man．He will never know what it feels like to yearn，to hope，to nourish his soul with the dream of something better．He will never know the experience of having someone who loves him give him something he has always wanted or never had． There is a wholeness about the person who has come to terms with his limitations，who has been brave enough to let go of his unrealistic dreams and not feel like a failure for doing so．There is a wholeness about the man or woman who has learned that he or she is strong enough to go through a tragedy and survive，who can lose someone and still feel like a complete person． Life is not a trap set for us by God so that he can condemn us for failing．Life is not a spelling bee，where no matter how many words you've gotten right，you're disqualified if you make one mistake．Life is more like a baseball season，where even the best team loses one－third of its games and even the worst team has its days of brilliance．Our goal is to win more games than we lose． When we accept that imperfection is part of being human，and when we can continue rolling through life and appreciate it，we will have achieved a wholeness that others can only aspire to．That，I believe，is what God asks of us－－not “Be perfect”，not “Don't even make a mistake”,but “Be whole．” If we are brave enough to love，strong enough to forgive，generous enough to rejoice in another's happiness，and wise enough to know there is enough love to go around for us all，then we can achieve a fulfillment5) that no other living creature will ever know． 2 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 the will, a quality of the 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 exits in a man of 60, more than a boy of 20.nobody grows merely by the number of years; we grow old by deserting our ideas. Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul. Worry, fear, self-distrust1 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 wonders, 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 infinite, so long as you are young. When the aerials are down, and your spirit is covered with the snows of cynicism and the ice of pessimism, then you’ve grown old, even at 20, but as long as your aerials are up, to catch waves of optimism, there’s hope you may die young at 80. 3 The Story of Life Sometimes people come into your life and you know right away that they were meant to be there, to serve some sort of purpose, to 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, possibly your roommate, neighbor, coworker, long-lost friend, 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 in life, things may happen to you that seem horrible, painful, and unfair, but in reflection, you find that without overcoming those obstacles, you would have never realized your potential, strength, willpower, or heart. "If you want a rainbow, you have to put up with the rain." Everything happens for a reason, nothing by chance or by means of luck, it happens because it is meant to be. 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 leading to nowhere. It would be safe and comfortable, yet dull and utterly pointless. The people you meet that will affect your life, will be the success and downfalls you experience though out life, they are who will help you create the person you will grow to become, even the bad experiences can be learned from. In fact, they are the most important experiences because, "Failure teaches success." 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 when you open you heart, how you must only give to the ones who are worthy of being loyal. If someone loves you, love them back unconditionally, not only because they love you, but also because in a way they are teaching you about how to love, have trust and about loyalty. Give them that chance to give and receive what they deserve for and from you. "Everything in life is temporary because everything changes, that's why it takes great courage to love, knowing it might end anytime, but having the faith that it will last forever." Make everyday count. Appreciate every moment and take from those moments everything you possibly can because that may be the only time in your life you will ever have that experience. Meet new people you have never met before, talk to people you have never talked to before, and actually listen to what they have to say, it might teach you something valuable, but always remember who your true friends are, "A true friend is someone who knows the song in your heart and can sing it back to you when you have forgotten the words". Let yourself live, love, and break free, make no boundaries, for you can accomplish anything as long as your heart is into it. This is your life, you run the show! Hold your head up because you have every right to. Tell yourself you are a special individual and there is no other out there the same as you. Believe in yourself, for it will be hard for others to believe in you. "If you don't stand up for something, you will fall for anything". You are in control and you can create your own life, so take chances, and go out and live it with absolutely no regret. "The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be". Most importantly, if you love someone tell him or her, for you never know what tomorrow will bring. Don't let one moment pass because it could change you forever. Don't ever fear life, because "What doesn't kill you will only make you stronger". Learn a valuable lesson in each day that you live. "The rich person is not who has the most but who needs the least". Life is too short to take seriously, so remember to begin each day with a smile, "Never frown, because you never know who might be falling in love with your smile." 4 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 of the summer night. Sometimes I know not if it be the 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, into whose silent darkness the spirit plunges, and floats away with some beloved spirit clasped in its embrace. 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 rooftops 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. 5 Our family creed   They are the principles on which my wife and I have tried to bring up our family. they are the principles in which my father believed and by which he governed his life. they are the principles, many of them, which I learned at my mother's knee.    they point the way to usefulness and happiness in life, to courage and peace in death.    If they mean to you what they mean to me, they may perhaps be helpful also to our sons for their guidance and inspiration.    Let me state them:   I believe in the supreme worth of the individual and in his right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.   I believe that every right implies a responsibility; every opportunity, an obligation; every possession, a duty.   I believe that the law was made for man and not man for the law; that government is the servant of the people and not their master.   I believe in the dignity of labor, whether with head or hand; that the world owes no man a living but that it owes every man an opportunity to make a living.   I believe that thrift is essential to well-ordered living and that economy is a prime requisite of a sound financial structure, whether in government, business or personal affairs.   I believe that truth and justice are fundamental to an enduring social order.   I believe in the sacredness of a promise, that a man's word should be as good as his bond, that character--not wealth or power or position -- is of supreme worth.   I believe that the rendering of useful service is the common duty of mankind and that only in the purifying fire of sacrifice is the dross of selfishness consumed and the greatness of the human soul set free.   I believe in an all-wise and all-loving God, named by whatever name, and that the individual's highest fulfillment, greatest happiness and widest usefulness are to be found in living in harmony with his will.   I believe that love is the greatest thing in the world; that it alone can overcome hate; the right can and will triumph over night.   These are the principles, however formulated, for which all good men and women throughout the world, irrespective of race or creed, education, social position or occupation, are standing, and for which many of them are suffering and dying.   These are the principles upon which alone a new world recognizing the brotherhood of man the fatherhood of God can be established. 6 The art of living    The art of living is to know when to hold fast and when to let go. For life is a paradox: it enjoins us to cling to its many gifts even while it ordains their eventual relinquishment. The rabbis of old put it this way: "A man comes to this world with his fist clenched, but when he dies, his hand is open." Surely we ought to hold fast to life. For it is wondrous, and full of a beauty that breaks through every pore of God's own earth. We know that this is so, but all too often we recognize this truth only in our backward glance when we remember what it was and then suddenly realize that it is no more. We remember a beauty that faded, a love that waned. But we remember with far greater pain that we did not see that beauty when it flowered, that we failed to respond with love when it was tendered. A recent experience re-taught me this truth. I was hospitalized following a severe heart attack that had been in intensive care for several days. It was not a pleasant place. One morning, I had to have some additional tests. The required machines were located in a building at the opposite end of the hospital, so I had to be wheeled across the courtyard on a gurney. As we emerged from our unit, the sunlight hit me. That's all there was to my experience. Just the light of the sun, and yet how beautiful it was - how warming, how sparkling, how brilliant! I looked to see whether anyone else relished the sun's golden glow, but everyone was hurrying to and fro, most with eyes fixed on the ground. Then I remembered how often I, too, had been indifferent to the grandeur of each day, too preoccupied with petty and sometimes even mean concerns to respond to the splendor of it all. The insight gleaned from that experience is really as commonplace as was the experience itself: life's gifts are precious-but we are too heedless of them. Here then is the first pile of life's paradoxical demands on us: Never too busy for the wonder and the awe of life. Be reverent before each dawning day. Embrace each hour. Seize each golden minute. Hold fast to life... but not so fast that you cannot let go. This is the second side of life's coin, the opposite pole of its paradox: we must accept our losses, and learn how to let go. This is not an easy lesson to learn, especially when we are young and think that world is ours to command, that whatever we desire with the full force of or passionate being can, nay, will, be ours. But then life moves along to confront us with realities, and slowly but surly this second truth dawns upon us. At every stage of life we sustain losses- and grow in the process. We begin our independent lives only when we emerge from the womb and lose its protective shelter. We enter a progression of schools, then we leave our mothers and fathers and our childhood homes. We get married and have children and then have to let them go. We face the gradual or not so gradual waning of our own strength. And ultimately, as the parable of the open and closed hand suggests, we must confront the inevitability of our own demise, losing ourselves, as it were, all that we were or dreamed to be. But why should we be reconciled to life's contradictory demands? Why fashion things of beauty when beauty is evanescent? Why give our heart in love when those we love will ultimately be　torn from our grasp? In order to resolve this paradox, we must seek a wider perspective, viewing our lives as through windows that open on eternity. Once we do that, we realize that though our lives are finite, our deeds on earth weave a timeless pattern. Life is never just being. It is a becoming, a relentless flowing on. Our parents live on through us, and we will live on through our children. The institutions we build endure, and we will endure through them. The beauty we fashion cannot be dimmed by death. Our flesh may perish, our hands will wither, but that which they create in beauty and goodness and truth lives on for all time to come. Don't spend and waste your lives accumulating objects that will only turn to dust and ashes. Pursue not so much the material as the ideal, for ideals alone invest life with meaning and are of enduring worth. Add love to a house and you have a home. Add righteousness to a city and you have a community. Add truth to a pile of red brick and you have a school. Add religion to the humblest of edifices and you have a sanctuary. Add justice to the far-flung round of human endeavor and you have civilization. Put them all together, exalt them above their present imperfections, add to them the vision of humankind redeemed, forever free of need and strife and you have a future lighted with the radiant colors of hope. 7 The Pleasure of Reading       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 books----but we must know how to avail ourselves of this treasure and how to get the most from it       I am most interested in people, in meeting 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 books new friends, new societies, new worlds.          If I am interested in people, others are interested not so much in who as in how. Who in the books includes everybody from science-fiction superman two hundred centuries in the future all the way back to the first figures in history. How covers everything from the ingenious explanations of Sherlock Holmes to the discoveries of science and ways of teaching manners to children.          Reading is a 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 beyond 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 library are like houses in a city. Although they are separate, together they all add up to something; they are connected with each other and with other cities. The same ideas, or related ones, turn up in different places; the human problems that repeat themselves in life repeat themselves in literature, but with different solutions according to different writings at different times.          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 something to you, and then relax with it, you will almost certainly have a good time--and if you become as a result of reading, better, wiser, kinder, or more gentle, you won't have suffered during the process.