世界经典短篇英语散文

经典的文字阅读总能给我们带来诸多的`感受，以下是小编整理的世界经典短篇英语散文，欢迎参考阅读！

　　The Pleasure of Reading

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.

　　The Delights of Books

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 // 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.”

　　On 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 ”.

　　On Education

Alfred North Whitehead

Education is the acquisition of the art of the utilization of is an art very, difficult to ever 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.

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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 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 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 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 e is no royal roads to learning through an airy path o f brilliant e 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.

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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 ing 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 Education