晨读英语美文60篇(含lrc字幕)The Road to Happiness
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[00:00.00]The Road to Happiness
[00:03.25]It is a commonplace among moralists
[00:07.72]that you cannot get happiness by pursuing it.
[00:10.44]This is only true if you pursue it unwisely.
[00:13.95]Gamblers at Monte Carlo are pursuing money,
[00:17.44]and most of them lose it instead,
[00:19.95]but there are other ways of pursuing money,
[00:22.59]which often succeed.
[00:24.02]So it is with happiness.
[00:26.20]If you pursue it by means of drink,
[00:28.51]you are forgetting the hangover.
[00:30.34]Epicurus pursued it by living only in congenial society
[00:34.83]and eating only dry bread,
[00:37.47]supplemented by a little cheese on feast days.
[00:41.18]His method proved successful in his case,
[00:43.92]but he was a valetudinarian,
[00:46.65]and most people would need something more vigorous.
[00:49.59]For most people, the pursuit of happiness,
[00:52.33]unless supplemented in various ways,
[00:54.87]is too abstract and theoretical
[00:57.59]to be adequate as a personal rule of life.
[00:59.88]But I think that whatever personal rule of life
[01:03.61]you may choose it should not,
[01:05.78]except in rare and heroic cases,
[01:08.42]be incompatible with happiness.
[01:10.37]If you look around at the men and women
[01:13.34]whom you can call happy,
[01:14.99]you will see that they all have certain things in common.
[01:18.48]The most important of these things is an activity
[01:21.97]which at most gradually builds up something
[01:24.51]that you are glad to see coming into existence.
[01:27.77]Women who take an instinctive pleasure in their children
[01:31.59]can get this kind of satisfaction out of bringing up a family.
[01:35.77]Artists and authors and men of science
[01:39.15]get happiness in this way
[01:40.47]if their own work seems good to them.
[01:42.65]But there are many humbler forms of the same kind of pleasure.
[01:46.91]Many men who spend their working life in the city
[01:50.21]devote their weekends to voluntary
[01:52.71]and unremunerated toil in their gardens,
[01:55.46]and when the spring comes,
[01:57.30]they experience all the joys of having created beauty.
[02:00.81]The whole subject of happiness has,
[02:03.76]in my opinion, been treated too solemnly.
[02:06.59]It had been thought that man cannot be happy
[02:10.22]without a theory of life or a religion.
[02:12.50]Perhaps those who have been rendered unhappy by a bad theory
[02:16.88]may need a better theory to help them to recover,
[02:20.28]just as you may need a tonic when you have been ill.
[02:24.10]But when things are normal a man should be healthy
[02:28.13]without a tonic and happy without a theory.
[02:30.44]It is the simple things that really matter.
[02:33.19]If a man delights in his wife and children,
[02:36.24]has success in work,
[02:37.90]and finds pleasure in the alternation of day and night,
[02:41.05]spring and autumn,
[02:42.37]he will be happy whatever his philosophy may be.
[02:45.97]If, on the other hand, he finds his wife fateful,
[02:49.80]his children’s noise unendurable, and the office a nightmare;
[02:54.28]if in the daytime he longs for night,
[02:57.14]and at night sighs for the light of day,
[02:59.97]then what he needs is not a new philosophy
[03:03.16]but a new regimen—a different diet, or more exercise, or what not.
[03:07.96]Man is an animal,
[03:09.91]and his happiness depends on his physiology
[03:12.88]more than he likes to think.
[03:14.54]This is a humble conclusion,
[03:16.71]but I cannot make myself disbelieve it.
[03:19.65]Unhappy businessmen, I am convinced,
[03:22.62]would increase their happiness more
[03:24.82]by walking six miles every day
[03:27.10]than by any conceivable change of philosophy.