激情晨读英语美文 第一章 人生如诗:真正的高贵

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The True Nobility
By Ernest Hemingway
In a calm sea 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 blessed by turns. Even death itself
makes life more loving. Men come closest to
their true selves in the sober moments of life,
under the shadows of sorry 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 self-control, patience, and discipline,
regulated by judgment.I have always believed that
the man who has begun to live more seriously
within begins to live 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 self.