中学生英语美文欣赏1 Threepassions,simplebutoverwhelminglystrong,havegovernedmylife:thelongingforlove,thesea下面是小编为大家整理的中学生英语美文欣赏3篇,供大家参考。
中学生英语美文欣赏1
Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a waywa
rd course over a deep ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.
I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy-ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of my life for a few hours for this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness-that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it, finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what-at last-I have found.
With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine...A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.
Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a hated burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.
This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.
中学生英语美文欣赏2
There were a sensitivity and a beauty to her that have nothing to do with looks. She was one to be listened to, whose words were so easy to take to heart.
It is said that the true nature of being is veiled. The labor of words, the expression of art, the seemingly ceaseless buzz that is human thought all have in common the need to get at what really is so. The hope to draw close to and possess the truth of being can be a feverish one. In some cases it can even be fatal, if pleasure is one"s truth and its attainment more important than life itself. In other lives, though, the search for what is truthful gives life.
I used to find notes left in the collection basket, beautiful notes about my homilies and about the writer"s thoughts on the daily scriptural readings. The person who penned the notes would add reflections to my thoughts and would always include some quotes from poets and mystics he or she had read and remembered and loved. The notes fascinated me. Here was someone immersed in a search for truth and beauty. Words had been treasured, words that were beautiful. And I felt as if the words somehow delighted in being discovered, for they were obviously very generous to the as yet anonymous writer of the notes. And now this person was in turn learning the secret of sharing them. Beauty so shines when given away. The only truth that exists is, in that sense, free.
It was a long time before I met the author of the notes.
One Sunday morning, I was told that someone was waiting for me in the office. The young person who answered the rectory door said that it was "the woman who said she left all the notes." When I saw her I was shocked, since I immediately recognized her from church but had no idea that it was she who wrote the notes. She was sitting in a chair in the office with her hands folded in her lap. Her head was bowed and when she raised it to look at me, she could barely smile without pain. Her face was disfigured, and the skin so tight from surgical procedures that smiling or laughing was very difficult for her. She had suffered terribly from treatment to remove the growths that had so marred her face.
We chatted for a while that Sunday morning and agreed to meet for lunch later that week.
As it turned out we went to lunch several times, and she always wore a hat during the meal. I think that treatments of some sort had caused a lot of her hair to fall out. We shared things about our lives. I told her about my schooling and growing up. She told me that she had worked for years for an insurance company. She never mentioned family, and I did not ask.
We spoke of authors we both had read, and it was easy to tell that books are a great love of hers.
I have thought about her often over the years and how she struggled in a society that places an incredible premium on looks, class, wealth and all the other fineries of life. She suffered from a disfigurement that cannot be made to look attractive. I know that her condition hurt her dee*.
Would her life have been different had she been pretty? Chances are it would have. And yet there were a sensitivity and a beauty to her that had nothing to do with looks. She was one to be listened to, whose words were so easy to take to heart. Her words came from a wounded but loving heart, very much like all hearts, but she had more of a need to be aware of it, to live with it and learn from it. She possessed a fine-tuned sense of beauty. Her only fear in life was the loss of a friend.
How long does it take most of us to reach that level of human growth, if we ever get there? We get so consumed and diminished, worrying about all the things that need improving, we can easily forget to cherish those things that last. Friendship, so rare and so good, just needs our care--maybe even the simple gesture of writing a little note now and then, or the dropping of some beautiful words in a basket, in the hope that such beauty will be shared and taken to heart.
The truth of her life was a desire to see beyond the surface for a glimpse of what it is that *. She found beauty and grace and they befriended her, and showed her what is real.
中学生英语美文欣赏3
Three centuries later, shortly before the birth of Christ, Egypt was still ruled by a living goddess, Cleopatra, a Greek descended from one of Alexander"s generals. She looked back to the Golden Age of Alexander"s world empire and was determined to do even better herself.
Alexander died at the age of 32. By the time Cleopatra was 23, she had gone ever further than Alexander making her entrance into Rome as Queen of Egypt and consort of Julius Caesar, the most powerful man in the world.
These were complex times. To keep your throne, you had to be adaptable, ruthless, intelligent and a great politician. Cleopatra had all these traits which is why history has provided us with lots of interpretations of Cleopatra. Renaissance poets saw her as a *e dying for love. And painters alluded to her eroticism in their bare breasted portrayals of the dying queen. Hollywood reinforced the image of Cleopatra as a vamp starting with Theda Bara"s seductive portrayal in 1917.
But who was the real Cleopatra? What did she really look like?
We"re in Berlin because this is the best portrait of Cleopatra in the world. There are very few ancient sculptures that are existing. So this is probably as close as we"re ever going to get to how she really looked. She"s rather plain looking, isn"t she? Look at her hair. It"s tied up in a simple bun. It"s a classical Greek hairstyle. It"s practical but not exactly designed to captivate a Roman general.
We know from ancient sources that her hair was a reddish color, wavy. But look at her nose. It"s a little bit too long and hooked at the end. And her mouth, is not exactly sensual. She"s not wearing any jewelry. There are no earrings, no necklace. This is not the portrait of a femme fatale.
The ancient sources tell us she was intelligent, witty, charming, a linguist and along with this, she had a tremendous determination. It was this amazing combination of abilities that made Cleopatra the most famous woman in history. It wasn"t her beauty.
Women in Egypt had always been powerful: Queen Hatshepsut, Nefertiti and now Cleopatra. But during the era of the Ptolemy"s, the role of Greek women had changed. They gained an identity apart from that of their husbands or families. Women participated in the arts and civic life and marriage became a union of two people, not just two houses. The portraits of the women of this period show strong individuals looking back at you with confidence. They"re almost haunting. Women would not have this power again until the 20th century. Cleopatra was well educated, strong minded with ideas of her own and a female.
As a intellectual, Cleopatra would have been heartbroken: when during fighting between Egyptians and Caesar"s Roman troops, there occurred one of the greatest tragedies of the ancient world - the burning of the library of Alexandria. It"s sad to think about what was lost in the fire at Alexandria. There are the missing manuscripts of Aristotle and Plato. They were probably there. There was an entire room with editions of Homer. Maybe even there were early manuscripts of the Old Testament, which could probably help settle Biblical questions today.
Cleopatra was eventually able to replace 200,000 of the manuscripts. Books were very important to her. It"s ironic that today everybody knows her for her beauty, but it was her intelligence that was most important asset she had.
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