UNIT 1 A Great Friend（一位伟大的朋友）
UNIT 2 The Joy of Labor（劳动之乐）
UNIT 3 We're Just Beginning（我们正在起跑点）
UNIT 4 Advice to a Young Man（给年轻人的建议）
UNIT 5 The Happy Door（开启快乐之门）
UNIT 6 Companionship of Books（以书为伴）
UNIT 7 Friendship（友谊）
UNIT 8 A Key to Happiness（快乐的钥匙）
UNIT 9 The Love of Beauty（爱美）
UNIT 10 For the Sake of Other Men（为别人而活）
UNIT 11 You Are What You Do（行为决定命运）
UNIT 12 Youth（青春）
UNIT 13 Have Faith in Others（相信别人）
UNIT 14 True Nobility（真正的高贵）
UNIT 15 Life Is Too Short to Be Little（人生苦短休计较）
UNIT 16 We Are on a Journey（人生之旅）
UNIT 17 The Joy of Living（生活的乐趣）
UNIT 18 To the Unknown Teacher（致无名之师）
UNIT 19 Self-control（自制）
UNIT 20 Lincoln's Gettysburg Address（林肯盖茨堡演讲词）
UNIT 21 An Excerpt of John F. Kennedy's Inaugural Address（肯尼迪总统就职演说摘录）
UNIT 1 A Great Friend
（一位伟大的朋友）Anonymous
As I am now a senior high school student, I have a great many friends, but there is one whom I prize over all the rest. I first made his acquaintance when I began to go to school. He has been my constant companion ever since.
Though he is serious in appearance, he never fails to be interesting. Often he is clever, sometimes even merry and gay. He is the most knowledgeable friend a person could have. He knows virtually every language of the world, all the events of history, and the words of all the great poets and philosophers. A kindly benefactor, he is admired and enjoyed by everyone who makes his acquaintance.
To me, he has been a great teacher as well as a friend. He first taught me the secrets of my own language and then those of others. With these key she showed us how to unlock all the arts and sciences of man.
My friend is endlessly patient. Dull though I may be, I can return to him again and again, and he is always ready to teach me. When I am bored, he entertains me. When I am dispirited, he lifts me up. When I am lonely, he keeps me company. He is a friend not only to me but to millions around the world. Shall I tell you his name? His name is “reading”.
UNIT 2 The Joy of Labor（劳动之乐）
Anonymous
Wise men of ancient times and successful men of today have told us that labor is sweet. Its reward is not material gain but what one becomes by it.
Work does much more for us than just giving us a living; it gives us our life and the reason for living. The real joys of life come from doing something and doing it well.
All of us hope for success, but it is illusive and hard to keep. It nearly always slips away from one like sand through the fingers, like water through a leaky pail, unless it is held tight but hard work, day by day, night by night, year in year out. Everyone who fears failure should work harder and harder with a faithful heart as long as he lasts.
UNIT 3 We're Just Beginning（我们正在起跑点）
Charles F Kettering
“We are reading the first verse of the first chapter of a book whose pages are infinite…”
I do not know who wrote these words, but I have always liked them as a reminder that the future can be anything we want to make it. We can take the mysterious, hazy future and carve out of it anything that we can imagine, just as a sculptor carves a statue from a shapeless stone.
We are all in the position of the farmer. If we plant a good seed, we reap a good harvest. If our seed is poor and full of weeds, we reap a useless crop. If we plant nothing at all, we harvest nothing at all.
I want the future to be better than the past. I don’t want it contaminated by the mistakes and errors with which history is filled. We should all be concerned about the future because that is where we will spend the remainder of out lives.
The past is gone and static. Nothing we can do will change it. The future is before us and dynamic. Everything we do will affect it. Each day brings with it new frontiers, in our homes and in our businesses, if we will only recognize them. We are just at the beginning of the progress in every field of human endeavor
UNIT 4 Advice to a Young Man（给年轻人的建议）
Robert Jones Burdette
Remember, my son, you have to work. Whether you handle a pick, a pen, a wheel-barrow or a set of books, you must work. If you look around, you will wee the men who are the most able to live the rest of their days without work are the men who work the hardest. Don’t be afraid of killing yourself with overwork. It is beyond your power to do that on the sunny side of thirty. They die sometimes, but it is because they quit work at six in the evening, and do not go home until two in the morning. It is the interval that kills, my son. The work gives you an appetite for your meals; it lends solidity to your slumber; it gives you a perfect and grateful appreciation of a holiday.
There are young men who do not work, but the world is not proud of them. It does not know their names, even. Nobody likes them; the great, busy world does not know that they are there. So find out what you want to be and do, and take off your coat and make a dust in the world. The busier you are, the less harm you will be apt to get into, the sweeter will be your sleep, the brighter and happier your holidays, and the better satisfied will the world be with you.
UNIT 5 The Happy Door（开启快乐之门）
Mildred Cram
Happiness is like a pebble dropped into a pool to set in motion an Ever-widening circle of ripples. Ad Stevenson has said, being happy is a duty.
There is no exact definition of the word happiness. Happy people are happy for all sorts of reasons. The key is not wealth or physical well-being, since we find beggars, invalids and so-called failures who are extremely happy.
Being happy is a sort of unexpected dividend. But staying happy is an accomplishment, a triumph of soul and character. It is not selfish to strive for it. It is, indeed, a duty to ourselves and others.
Being unhappy is like an infectious disease; it causes people to shrink away from the sufferer. He soon finds himself alone, miserable and embittered. There is, however, a cure so simple as to seem, at first glance, ridiculous: if you don’t feel happy, pretend to be!
It works. Before long you will find that instead of repelling people, you attract them. You discover how deeply rewarding it is to be the center of wide circles of good will.
Then the make-believe becomes a reality. You possess the secret of peace of mind, and can forget yourself in being of service to others.
Being happy, once it is realized as a duty and established as a habit, opens doors into unimaginable gardens thronged with grateful friends.
UNIT 6 Companionship of Books（以书为伴）
A man may usually be known by the books he reads as well as the company he keeps; for there is a companionship of books as well as of men; and one should always live in the best company, whether it be of books or of men.
A good book may be among the best of friends. It is the same today that it always was, and it will never change. It is the most patient and cheerful of companions. It does not turn its back upon us in times of adversity or distress. It always receives us with the same kindness, amusing and instructing us in youth, and comforting and consoling us in age.
Men often discover their affinity to each other by the love they each have for a book. The book is a truer and higher bond of union. Men can think, feel, and sympathize with each other through their favorite author. They live in him together, and he, in them.
A good book is often the best urn of a life enshrining the best that life could think out, for the world of a man’s life is, for the most part, but the world of his thoughts. Thus the best books are treasuries of good words, the golden thoughts, which, remembered and cherished, become our constant companions and comforters.
Books possess an essence of immortality. They are by far the most lasting products of human effort. Temples and statues decay, but books survive. Time is of no account with great thoughts, which are as fresh today as when they first passed through their authors’ minds ages ago. What was then said and thought still speaks to us as vividly as ever from the printed page.
Books introduce us into the best society; they bring us into the presence of the greatest minds that have ever lived. We hear what they said and did; we see them as if they were really alive; we sympathize with them, grieve with them; their experience becomes ours, and we feel as if we were in a measure actors with them in the scenes which they describe.
UNIT 7 Friendship（友谊）
Oriaon Swett Marden
No young man starting life could have better capital than plenty of friends. They will strengthen his credit, support him in every great effort, and make him what, unaided, he could never be. Friends of the right sort will help him more——to be happy and successful——than much money or great learning.
Friendship is no one-sided affair. There can be no friendship without reciprocity. One cannot receive all and give nothing, or give all and receive nothing, and experience the joy and fullness of true companionship.
Those who would make friends must cultivate the qualities which are admired and which attract. If you are mean, stingy and selfish, nobody will admire you. You must cultivate generosity and large-heartedness; you must be magnanimous and tolerant; you must have positive qualities, for a negative, shrinking, apologizing, roundabout man is despised. You must believe in yourself. If you do not, others will not believe in you. You must look upward and be hopeful, cheery, and optimistic. No one will be attracted to a gloomy pessimist.
UNIT 8 A Key to Happiness（快乐的钥匙）
To help others, you don’t have to be an efficient expert in the art; the main thing is the intention. You may be crude and clumsy, wasteful and ineffective, but if you sincerely try to help, your attempt produces nothing but good. The one your are trying to help knows your intention and is strengthened and encouraged by the magic of your sharing. In nearly every case, your simple desire to help, converted into action, produce the good sought. But perhaps the greatest good is the good that you yourself get out of the attempt. Service to others delivers more joy to you than the joy you deliver to them. In doing good, you free yourself from the terrible burden of self; you escape from yourself into a clean world of joy and light. The good you simply try to do, regardless of the outcome, is always a success inside yourself.
Unselfish giving is your most efficient formula for happiness, for you have embraced eternity instead of self; you have felt life, and you are now the world bigger than you were before you began the project.
UNIT 9 The Love of Beauty（爱美）
The love of beauty is an essential part of all healthy human nature. It is a moral quality. The absence of it is not an assured ground of condemnation ,but the presence of it is an in-variable sign of goodness of heart . In proportion to the degree in which it is felt will probably be the in which nobleness and beauty of character will be attained.
Natural beauty is an all-pervading presence. The universe is its temple. It unfolds into the numberless flowers of spring. It waves in the branches of trees and the green blades of grass. It haunts the depths of the earth and the sea. It gleams from the hues of the shell and the precious stone. And not only these minute objects but the oceans, the mountains, the clouds, the stars, the rising and the setting sun-all overflow with beauty. This beauty is so precious, and so congenial to our tenderest and noblest feelings, that it is painful to think of the multitude of people living in the midst of it and yet remaining almost blind to it.
All persons should seek to become acquainted with the beauty in nature. There is not a worm we tread upon, nor a leaf that dances merrily as it falls before the autumn winds, but calls for our study and admiration. The power to appreciate beauty not merely increases our sources of happiness—it enlarges our moral nature, too. Beauty calms our restlessness and dispels our cares. Go into the fields or the woods, spend a summer day by the sea or the mountains, and all your little perplexities and anxieties will vanish, Listen to sweet music, and your foolish fears and petty jealousies will pass away. The beauty of the world helps us to seek and find the beauty of goodness.
UNIT 10 For the Sake of Other Men（为别人而活）
Strange is our situation here upon earth. Each of us comes for a short visit, not knowing why, yet sometimes seeming to divine a purpose.
From the standpoint of daily life, how ever, there is one thing we do know: that man is here foe the sake of other men----above all for those upon whose smile and well-being our own happiness depends, and also for the countless unknown souls with whose fate we are connected by a bond of sympathy. Many times a day I realize how much my own outer and inner life is built upon the labors of my fellow men, both living and dead, and how earnestly I must exert myself in order to give in return as much as I have received. My peace of mind is often troubles by the depressing sense that I have borrowed too heavily from the work of other men.
To ponder interminably over the reason for one’s own existence or the meaning of life in general seems to me, from an objective point of view, to be sheer folly. And yet everyone holds certain ideals by which he guides his aspiration and his judgment. The ideals which have always shone before me and filled me with the joy of living are goodness, beauty, and truth. To make a goal of comfort and happiness has never appealed to me; a system of ethics built on this basis would be sufficient only for a herd of cattle.
UNIT 11 You Are What You Do（行为决定命运）
If the past has taught us anything, it is that every cause brings effect-every action has a consequence. This thought, in my opinion, is the moral foundation of the universe; it applies equally in this world and the next.
We Chinese have a saying:” if a man plants melons, he will reap melons; if he sows beans, he will reap beans.” And this is true of every man’s life: good begets good, and evil leads to evil. True enough, the sun shines on the saint and sinner alike, and too often it seems that the wicked wax and prosper. But we can say with certitude that,
with the individual as with the nation, the flourishing of the wicked is an illusion, for, unceasingly, life keeps books of us all.
In the end, we are all the sum total of out action. Character cannot be counterfeited, nor can it be put on and cast off as if it were a garment to meet the whim of the moment. Like the markings on wood which are ingrained in the very heart of the tree, character requires time and nurture for growth and development.
Thus also, day by day, we write out own destiny, for inexorably we become what we do. This, I believe, is the supreme logic and the law of life.
UNIT 12 Youth（青春）
Youth is not just a stage 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 spring of life.
Youth means the predominance of courage over timidity, of adventure over the love of ease. This often exists in a man of sixty more than in a boy of twenty. Nobody grows old merely by believing 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, doubt, self-distrust, fear and despair---these bow the head and turn the growing spirit back o dust.
Whether sixty or sixteen there is in every human being’s heart the love of wonder, the sweet amazement of the stars and the star-like things, the undaunted challenge of events, the unfailing childlike appetite for what-next and the joy of the game of living.
You are ay young ad your faith, as old as your doubt, as young as your self-confidence, as old as your fear, as young as your hope, as old as your despair.
UNIT 13 Have Faith in Others（相信别人）
Belief is a happier state of mind than doubt and suspicion. By this I live, for if I don’t have faith in others, who will believe in me? I would rather believe in a thousand people, friends and strangers, and have 999 fail me than not believe. If many fail me, I remember how many I failed.
This is not to say that the blind belief of sentimentality, the so-called “tolerance” of the dishonest and vicious, is sensible or rewarding. There are some dark corners which do not react to sweetness and light. Belief in people should be accomplished with open eyes and clarity of judgment. But when your judgment proves bad rather than good, it’s no reason to walk thereafter with suspicion as a companion.
None knows another’s heart, his grief his struggle, his despair and motivation. Not all our geese become swans, but one swan atones for many flocks of geese. All men share pain and mortality; some bear these better than others, and multitudes have perished spiritually for the lack of another’s belief in them.
So, I would rather be disappointed than afraid of disappointment.
UNIT 14 True Nobility（真正的高贵）
by Ernest Hemingway
In a calm sea every man is a pilot.
But all sunshine without shade, all pleasure without pain, is not life at all. Take the lot of the happiest----it is a tangled yarn. Bereavements and blessings, one following another, make us sad and blessed by turns. Even death itself makes life more loving. Men come closest to their true selves in the sober moments of life, under the shadows of sorrow and loss.
In the affairs of life or of business, it is not intellect that tells so much as character, not brains so much as heart, not genius so much as self-control, patience, and discipline, regulated by judgment.
I have always believed that the man who has begun to live more seriously within begins to live more simply without. In an age of extravagance and waste, I wish I could show to the world how few the real wants of humanity are.
To regret one's errors to the point of not repeating them is true repentance. There is nothing noble in being superior to some other man. The true nobility is in being superior to your previous self.
UNIT 15 Life Is Too Short to Be Little
（人生苦短休计较）
by Orison Swett Marden
We men are imperfect beings, so conflicts among us are unavoidable. Inevitably, we sometimes feel injured, insulted, or slighted. Perhaps we put our faith in another, and were disappointed; perhaps we felt we deserved one's gratitude, and were denied; perhaps we wished to join our offers to those of a group, and were rejected.
Such experiences are painful indeed, but is it not foolish to let them occupy our thoughts and precious time? For what does it profit us to dwell on trivial matters. The priceless days must be spent meaningfully, joyfully. How thoughtless to waste the irreplaceable hours reviewing insignificant incidents, bearing a grudge or pitying oneself! Far better to embrace with gratitude the gift of each day to make the most of every moment by filling it with purpose or appreciation.
Consider this thought when next you feel tempted to nurse a grievance: that life is too short to be little!
UNIT 16 We Are on a Journey（人生之旅）
by Henry Van Dyke
Wherever you are, and whoever you may be, there is one thing in which you and I are just alike at this moment, and in all the moments of our existence. We are not at rest, we are on a journey. Our life is a movement, a tendency, a steady, ceaseless progress towards an unseen goal. We are gaining something, or losing something, every day. Even when our position and our character seem to remain precisely the same, they are changing, for the mere advance of time is a change. It is not the same thing to have a bare field in January and in July. The season makes the difference. The limitations that are childlike in the child are childish in the man.
Everything that we do is a step in one direction or another. Even the failure to do something is in itself a deed. It sets us forward or backward. The action of the negative pole of a magnetic needle is just as real as the action of positive pole. To decline is to accept the other alternative.
Are you nearer to your port today than you were yesterday? Yes, you must be a little nearer to some port or other, for since your ship was launched upon the sea of life, you have never been still for a single moment-- the sea is too deep, you could not find an anchorage if you would, there can be no pause until you come into port.
UNIT 17 The Joy of Living（生活的乐趣）
by A.T. Rowe
Joy in living comes from having fine emotions, trusting them, giving them the freedom of a bird in the open. Joy in living can never be assumed as a pose, or put on from the outside as a mask. People who have this joy don not need to talk about it; they radiate it. They just live out their joy and let it splash its sunlight and glow into other lives as naturally as bird sings.
We can never get it by working for it directly. It comes, like happiness, to those who are aiming at something higher. It is a byproduct of great, simple living. The joy of living comes from what we put into living, not from what we seek to get from it.
UNIT 18 To the Unknown Teacher（致无名之师）
by Henry Van Dyke
by Henry Van Dyke
I sing the praise of the Unknown Teacher. Great Generals win campaigns, but it is the Unknown Soldier who wins the war. Famous educators plan new systems of pedagogy, but it is the Unknown Teacher who delivers and guides the young. He lives in obscurity and contends with hardship. For him no trumpets blare, no chariots wait, no golden decorations are decreed. He knows the watch along the borders of darkness, and makes the attack on the trenches of ignorance and folly.
UNIT 20 Lincoln's Gettysburg Address
（林肯盖茨堡演讲词）
Abraham Lincoln
(Delivered on the 19th Day of November, 1863 Cemetery Hill, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania )
Fourscore and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth upon 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 a final resting-place for those who gave their lives that Nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But, in a 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 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 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 this Nation, under GOD, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the People by the People and for the People shall not perish from the earth." Abraham Lincoln
UNIT 21 An Excerpt of John F. Kennedy's Inaugural Address（肯尼迪总统就职演说摘录）
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