Passage I
True Nobility
by Ernest Hemingway
In a calm a 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 blesd by turns. Even death itlf makes life more loving. Men come clost to their true lves 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 lf-control, patience, and discipline, regulated by judgment.
I have always believed that the man who has begun to live more riously within begins to li
ve 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 lf.(190 words)
风平浪静之时,人人皆能驾驭船只。
倘只见阳光不见阴霾,只见愉悦欢笑,不见悲伤泪泣,其去生活的本意也渐远了。人生至乐，其实如一团纠结的麻线；事有悲欢离合，因循往复，人有喜怒哀乐，周而复始，甚至死亦能让人对生益加眷恋。所以，人当惘然若失,悲从衷来之时,往往最接近自我。
不论人生琐事，还是职场羁务，就其作用论，才智不及性情，大脑不如内心，禀赋不企有赖于判断力的自制，耐心，纪律和规律；余不一一。
我深信为人内行醇谨之始，于外在则更趋简单。而今之世，物欲充塞，奢靡成风，我愿告之世人，内心真正需求之物，本不甚多。
错而能改，不蹈覆辙，始为真悔；胜人一筹，高人一等，妄论高贵；真高贵者，唯在于能胜己，汲取前路得失，以期后有所成。
Passage II
Be Happy!
by Lloyd Morris
“The days that make us happy make us wi.”
—John Mafield
When I first read this line by England’s Poet Laureate, it startled me. What did Mafield mean? Without thinking about it much, I had always assumed that the opposite was true. But his sober assurance was arresting. I could not forget it.
Finally I emed to grasp his meaning and realized that here was a profound obrvation. The wisdom that happiness makes possible lies in clear perception, not fogg
ed by anxiety nor dimmed by despair and boredom, and without the blind spots caud by fear.
Active happiness—not mere satisfaction or contentment—often comes suddenly, like an April shower or the unfolding of a bud. Then you discover what kind of wisdom has accompanied it. The grass is greener, bird songs are sweeter, the shortcomings of your friends are more understandable and more forgivable. Happiness is like a pair of eyeglass correcting your spiritual vision.
Nor are the insights of happiness limited to what is near around you. Unhappy, with your thoughts turned in upon your emotional woes, your vision is cut short as though by a wall. Happy, the wall crumbles.
The long vista is there for the eing. The ground at your feet, the world about you—people, thoughts, emotions, pressures—are now fitted into the larger scene. Everything assumes a fairer proportion. And here is the beginning of wisdom. (233 words)
Passage III
The Strenuous Life
by Theodore Roovelt
A life of slothful ea, a life of that peace which springs merely from lack either of desire or of power to strive after great things, is as little worthy of a nation as of an individual.
We do not admire the man of timid peace. We admire the man who embodies victorious effort; the man who never wrongs his neighbor, who is prompt to help a friend, but who has tho virile qualities necessary to win in the stern strife of actual life. It is hard to fail, but it is wor never to have tried to succeed. In this life we get nothing save by effort. Freedom from effort in the prent merely means that there has been effort stored up in the past. A man can be freed from the necessity of work only by the fact that he or his fathers before him have worked to good purpo. If the freedom thus purchad is ud aright, and the man still does actual work, though of a different kind, whether as a writer or a general, whether in the field of politics or in the field of exploration and adventure, he shows he derves his good fortune.
