分類: Selected Famous English Works

On Good Will
by Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

NOTHING can possibly be conceived in the world, or even out of it, which can be called good, without qualification, except a Good will.
Intelligence, wit, judgement, and the other talents of the mind, however they may be named, or courage, resolution, perseverance, as qualities of temperament, are undoubtedly good and desirable in many respects; but these gifts of nature may also become extremely bad and mischievous if the will which is to make use of them, and which, therefore, constitutes what is called character, is not good.
It is the same with the gifts of fortune.
Power, riches, honour, even health, and the general well-being and contentment with one’s condition which is called happiness, inspire pride, and often presumption, if there is not a good will to correct the influence of these on the mind, and with this also to rectify the whole principle of acting, and adapt it to its end.
The sight of a being who is not adorned with a single feature of a pure and good will, enjoying unbroken prosperity, can never give pleasure to an impartial rational spectator.
Thus a good will appears to constitute the indispensable condition even of being worthy of happiness.

A good will is good not because of what it performs or effects, not by its aptness for the attainment of some proposed end, but simply by virtue of the volition, that is, it is good in itself, and considered by itself is to be esteemed much higher than all that can be brought about by it in favour of any inclination, nay, even of the sum-total of all inclinations.

Virtue
by George Herbert (1593-1633)

Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright,
The bridal of the earth and sky;
The dew shall weep thy fall to night,
For thou must die.

Sweet rose, whose hue, angry and brave,
Bids the rash gazer wipe his eye;
The root is ever in its grave,
And thou must die.

Sweet spring, full of sweet days and roses,
A box where sweets compacted lie;
My music shows ye have your closes,
And all must die.

Only a sweet and virtuous soul,
Like seasoned timber, never gives;
But though the whole world turn to coal,
Then chiefly lives.

To Be, or Not to be
by William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

To be, or not to be: that is the question: Whether’tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them.
To die: to sleep; No more; and by a sleep to say we end The heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.
‘Tis a consummation Devoutly to be wish’d.
To die, to sleep; To sleep?
Perchance to dream! aye, there’s the rub; For in that sleep of death what dreams may come, When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause: there’s the respect That makes calamity of so long life; For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay, The insolence of office, and the spurns That patient merit of the unworthy takes, When he himself might his quietus make With a bare bodkin?

Who would fardels bear, To grunt and sweat under a weary life, But that the dread of something after death, The undiscovered country from whose bourn No traveller returns, puzzles the will And makes us rather bear those ills we have Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all, And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, And enterprises of great pith and moment With this regard their currents turn awry And lose the name of action.

(From Hamlet)

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
by William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death.
Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more:
it is a tale Told by an idiot,
full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

(From Macbeth)

Spring
by William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

When daisies pied and violets blue,
And lady-smocks all silver-white,
And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue
Do paint the meadows with delight,
The cuckoo then, on every tree,
Mocks married men; for thus sings he,
“Cuckoo!
Cuckoo, cuckoo!” O word of fear,
Unpleasing to a married ear!
When shepherds pipe on oaten straws,
And merry larks are ploughmen’s clocks,
When turtles tread, and rooks, and daws,
And maidens bleach their summer smocks,
The cuckoo then, on every tree,
Mocks married men; for thus sings he,
“Cuckoo!
Cuckoo, cuckoo!” O word of fear,
Unpleasing to a married ear!

Of Study
by Francis Bacon (1561-1626)

Studies serve for delight, for ornament, and for ability.
Their chief use for delight, is in privateness and retiring; for ornament, is in discourse; and for ability, is in the judgment and disposition of business.
For expert men can execute, and perhaps judge of particulars, one by one; but the general counsels, and the plots and marshalling of affairs, come best from those that are learned…

Reading makes a full man; conference a ready man; and writing and exact man.
And therefore, if a man write little, he had need have a great memory; if he confer little, he had need have a present wit; and if he read little, he head need have much cunning, to seem to know that he does not.
Histories make men wise; poets, witty; the mathematics, subtle; natural philosophy, deep; moral, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend; Abeunt studia in mores.
Nay, there is no stone or impediment in the wit, but may be wrought out by fit studies; like as diseases of the body may have appropriate exercises.
Bowling is good for the stone and reins; shooting for the lungs and breast; gentle walking for the stomach; riding for the head; and the like…

On Friendship
By Aristotle (384-322 B.C)

As the motives to Friendship differ in kind, so do the respective feelings and Friendships.
The species then of Friendship are three, in number equal to the objects of it, since in the line of each there may be “mutual affection mutually known.”

Now they who have Friendship for one another desire one another’s good according to the motive of their Friendship; accordingly they whose motive is utility have no Friendship for one another really, but only insofar as some good arises to them from one another.

And they whose motive is pleasure are in like case: I mean，they have Friendship for men of easy pleasantry, not because they are of a given character but because they are pleasant to themselves…

Such Friendships are of course very liable to dissolution if the parties do not continue alike: I mean, that the others cease to have any Friendship for them when they are no longer pleasurable or useful…

That then is perfect Friendship which subsists between those who are good and whose similarity consists in their goodness: for these men wish one another’s good in similar ways; insofar as they are good (and good they are in themselves); and those are specially friends who wish good to their friends for their sakes, because they feel thus toward them on their own account and not as a mere matter of result; so the Friendship between these men continues to subsist so long as they are good; and goodness, we know, has in it a principle of permanence…

Rare it is probable Friendships of this kind will be, because men of this kind are rare.
Besides, all requisite qualifications being presupposed, there is further required time and intimacy: for, as the proverb says, men cannot know one another “till they have eaten the requisite quantity of salt together”; nor can they in fact admit one another to intimacy, much less be friends, till each has appeared to the other and been proved to be a fit object of Friendship.
They who speedily commence an interchange of friendly actions may be said to wish to be friends, but they are not so unless they are also proper objects of Friendship and mutually known to be such: that is to say, a desire for Friendship may arise quickly but not Friendship itself.

(From the Nicomachean Ethics)

On Self—Discipline
By Aristotle (384-322 B.C)

Virtue, then, is of two kinds, intellectual and moral.
Intellectual virtue springs from and grows from teaching, and therefore needs experience and time.
Moral virtues come from habit…
They are in us neither by nature, nor in despite of nature, but we are furnished by nature with a capacity for receiving them, and we develop them through habit…
These virtues we acquire by first exercising them, as in the case of other arts.
Whatever we learn to do, we learn by actually doing it: men come to be builders, for instance, by building, and harp players, by playing the harp.
In the same way, by doing just acts we come to be just; by doing self-controlled acts, we come to be self-controlled; and by doing brave acts, we become brave…

How we act in our relations with other people makes us just or unjust.
How we face dangerous situations, either accustoming ourselves to fear or confidence, makes us brave or cowardly.
Occasions of lust and anger are similar: some people become self-controlled and patient from their conduct in such situations, and others uncontrolled and passionate.
In a word, then, activities produce similar dispositions.
Therefore we must give a certain character to our activities…
In short, the habits we form from childhood make no small difference, but rather they make all the difference.

Moral virtue is a mean that lies between two vices, one of excess and the other of deficiency, and… it aims at hitting the mean both in feelings and actions.
So it is hard to be good, for surely it is hard in each instance to find the mean, just as it is difficult to find the center of a circle.
It is easy to get angry or to spend money– anyone can do that.
But to act the right way toward the right person, in due proportion, at the right time, for the right reason, and in the right manner–this is not easy, and not everyone can do it.

(From the Nicomachean Ethics)

On Justice
by Plato (427-347 B.C)

But in reality justice was such as we were describing, being concerned however, not with the outward man, but with the inward, which is the true self and concernment of man: for the just man does not permit the several elements within him to interfere with one another, or any of them to do the work of others–he sets in order his own inner life, and is his own master and his own law, and at peace with himself; and when he has bound together the three principles within him, which may be compared to the higher, lower, and middle notes of the scale, and the intermediate intervals–when he has bound all these together, and is no longer many, but has become one entirely temperate and perfectly adjusted nature, then he proceeds to act, if he has to act, whether in a matter of property, or in the treatment of the body, or in some affair of politics or private business; always thinking and calling that which preserves and co-operates with this harmonious condition, just and good action, and the knowledge which presides over it, wisdom, and that which at any time impairs this condition, he will call unjust action, and the opinion which presides over it ignorance.

The Sun-God and “Sunflower”
(Myths of Greece and Rome)

Clytie was a water-nymph and in love with Apollo, who made her no return.
So she pined away, sitting all day long upon the cold ground, with her unbound tresses streaming over her shoulders.
Nine days she sat and tasted neither food nor drink, her own tears and the chilly dew her only food.
She gazed on the sun when he rose, and as he passed through his daily course to his setting; she saw no other object, her face turned constantly on him.
At last, they say, her limbs rooted in the ground, her face became a flower, which turns on its stem so as always to face the sun throughout its daily course; for it retains to that extent the feeling of the nymph from whom it sprang.