[转载]英语励志美文朗读（配音频）---推荐

What I have Lived For 我生活的目标 

What I have lived for

  Bertrand Russell

Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life ---the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and the unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a deep ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.
有三种朴实却异常强烈的激情左右着我的人生：渴望爱情、寻求知识和对受苦人的怜悯。这三种激情尤如飓风肆意地吹着我,从无边的苦海吹向绝境。

I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy —ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of living for a few hours of 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.
我寻找爱，因为爱使人陶醉。我常常宁愿用我全部的余生来换取几个小时这样的欣喜。我寻找爱，因为爱使我解除了孤寂，解除了一个颤抖的灵魂从人世间到冷漠无底的深渊所经历的孤寂。我寻找爱，因为我在爱的缩影中看到了圣人和诗人眼里天堂的景象。这就是以往我寻找的，虽然对于人生来说似乎过于美好，但我终于找到了。

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. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.
以同样的激情，我寻求知识。我渴望理解人类的心灵。我想知道群星为何闪烁。我试图领悟毕达哥拉斯的数的魔力，它支配着数的和谐。我已多少达到了此目的。

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.
爱和知识总是通往天堂。但是怜悯总把我带回尘世。痛苦喊叫的回声在我心中回荡。挨饿的孩子，遭摧残的受害者，被子女视为累赘的无助老人，以及这个充满孤独、贫穷和痛苦的世界，是对应有人生的一种嘲弄。我渴望减轻这种灾难，但是我无能为力，我也在受苦。

This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.
这就是我的一生。我觉得值得一过。如果还有来世，我愿再过一次。

Youth

 Samuel Ullman

Youth is not a time 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 springs of life.

Youth means a temperamental predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over the love of ease. This often exists in a man of 60 more than a boy of 20. Nobody grows old merely by 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, fear, self-distrust bows the heart and turns the spring back to dust.

Whether 60 or 16, there is in every human being’s heart the lure of wonder, the unfailing childlike appetite of what’s next and the joy of the game of living.　In the center of your heart and my heart there is a wireless station: so long as it receives messages of beauty, hope, cheer, courage and power from men and from the Infinite, so long are you young.

When the aerials are down, and your spirit is covered with snows of cynicism and the ice of pessimism, then you are grown old, even at 20, but as long as your aerials are up, to catch waves of optimism, there is hope you may die young at 80.

附上几篇适合激情朗读的美文，大家可以练练：

1. Freedom parrot

A man, a great man, a fighter for freedom was traveling in the mountains. He stayed in a caravan for the night. He was amazed that in the caravan there was a beautiful parrot in a golden cage, continually repeating “Freedom! Freedom!”. And it was such a place that when the parrot repeated the word “Freedom!” it would go on echoing in the valleys, in the mountains.

The man thought: “I have seen many parrots, and I have thought they must want to be free from those cages... but I have never seen such a parrot whose whole day, from the morning to the evening when he goes to sleep, is spent in calling out for freedom.” He had an idea. In the middle of the night, when the owner was fast asleep, he got up and opened the door of the cage. He whispered to the parrot, “Now get out.”

But he was very surprised that the parrot was clinging to the bars of the cage. He said to him again and again, “Have you forgotten about freedom? Just get out! The door is open and the owner is fast asleep; nobody will ever know. You just fly into the sky; the whole sky is yours.”

But the parrot was clinging so deeply, so hard, that the man said, “What is the matter? Are you mad?” He tried to take the parrot out with his own hands, but the parrot started pecking at him, and at the same time he was shouting, “Freedom! Freedom!” The valleys in the night echoed and re-echoed, but the man was also stubborn; he was a freedom fighter.

He pulled the parrot out and threw him into the sky; and he was very satisfied, although his hand was hurt. The parrot had attacked him as forcefully as he could, but the man was immensely satisfied that he had made a soul free. He went to sleep.

In the morning, as the man was waking up, he heard the parrot shouting, “Freedom! Freedom!” He thought perhaps the parrot must be sitting on a tree or on a rock. But when he came out, the parrot was sitting in the cage. The door was open.

2. The Best Age to Be

How often one hears children wishing they were grown up, and old people wishing they were young again. Each age has its pleasures and its pains, and the happiest person is the one who enjoys what each age gives him without wasting his time in useless regrets.

Childhood is a time when there are few responsibilities to make life difficult. If a child has good parents, he is fed, looked after and loved, whatever he may do. It is impossible that he will ever again in his life be given so much without having to do anything in return. In addition, life is always presenting new things to the child --- things that have lost their interest for older people because they are too well-known. But a child has his pains: he is not so free to do what he wishes to do; he is continually told not to do things, or being punished for what he has done wrong.

When the young man starts to earn his own living, he can no longer expect others to pay for his food, his clothes, and his room, but has to work if he wants to live comfortably. If he spends most of his time playing about in the way that he used to as a child, he will go hungry. And if he breaks the laws of society as he used to break the laws of his parents, he may go to prison. If, however, he works hard, keeps out of trouble and has good health, he can have the great happiness of building up for himself his own position in society.

Old age has always been thought of as the worst age to be; but it is not necessary for the old to be unhappy. With old age should come wisdom and the ability to help others with advice wisely given. The old can have the joy of seeing their children making progress in life; they can watch their grandchildren growing up around them; and, perhaps best of all, they can, if their life has been a useful one, feel the happiness of having come through the battle of life safely and having reached a time when they can lie back and rest, leaving others continue the fight.

3. Be Happy

“The days that make us happy make us wise.”----John Masefield

When I first read this line by England’s Poet Laureate, it startled me. What did Masefield 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 seemed to grasp his meaning and realized that here was a profound observation. The wisdom that happiness makes possible lies in clear perception, not fogged by anxiety nor dimmed by despair and boredom, and without the blind spots caused 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 eyeglasses 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 seeing. 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.

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