英語經典美文誦讀100篇：090.the strenuous life

[00:04.99]090.The Strenuous Life [00:10.59]A life of slothful ease, a life of that peace which springs merely from lack [00:18.25]either of desire or of power to strive after great things, is as little worthy of a nation as an individual. [00:27.86]We do not admire the man of timid peace. We admire the man who embodies victorious efforts, [00:36.76]the man who never wrongs his neighbor, who is prompt to help a friend, [00:42.52]but who has those virile qualities necessary to win in the stern strife of actual life. [00:50.79]It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed. [00:57.34]In this life we get nothing save by effort. Freedom from effort in the present merely means [01:04.27]that there has been effort stored up in the past. [01:09.05]A man can be freed from the necessity of work only by the fact [01:13.95]that he or his fathers before him have worked to good purpose. [01:19.67]If the freedom thus purchased is used aright, and the man [01:24.38]still does actual work, though of a different kind, [01:28.62]whether as a writer or a general, whether in the field of politics or in the field of exploration and adventure, [01:36.75]he shows he deserves his good fortune. [01:41.39]But if he treats this period of freedom from the need of actual labor as a period, [01:48.42]not of preparation, but of mere enjoyment, even though perhaps not of vicious enjoyment, [01:55.48]he shows that he is simply a cumberer on the earth’s surface; [02:00.43]and he surely unfits himself to hold his own place with his fellows, [02:05.23]if the need to do so should again arise. A mere life of ease is not in the end a very satisfactory life, and, above all, [02:17.05]it is a life which ultimately unfits those who follow it for serious work in the world. As it is with the individual, [02:26.29]so it is with the nation. It is a base untruth to say that happy is the nation that has no history. [02:35.28]Thrice happy is the nation that has a glorious history. Far better it is to dare mighty things, [02:43.76]to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, [02:49.06]than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, [02:55.53]because they live in the gray twillight that knows neither victory nor defeat.

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