Page 2
This is a collection of 100 beautiful essays in English.Each essay is good for reading. I hope you will find the essays interesting and knowledge giving.
Make a schedule to read one or two essays/articles daily to keep improving your English language.
There are total 10 web pages , each containing 10 essays.You can progress on page numbers and essays by clicking from the links provided.
| Page 1 | Essays 1-10 |
| Page 2 | Essays 10-20 |
| Page 3 | Essays 21-30 |
| Page 4 | Essays 31-40 |
| Page 5 | Essays 41-50 |
| Page 6 | Essays 51-60 |
| Page 7 | Essays 61-70 |
| Page 8 | Essays 71-80 |
| Page 9 | Essays 81-90 |
| Page 10 | Essays 91-100 |
Passage 11. A Summer Day
One day thirty years ago Marseilles lay in the burning sun.
A blazing sun upon a fierce August day was no greater rarity in southern France than at any other time before or since.
Everything in Marseilles and about Marseilles had stared at the fervid sun, and had been stared at in return, until a staring habit had become universal there.
Strangers were stared out of countenance by staring white houses, staring white streets, staring tracts of arid road, staring hills from which verdure was burnt away.
The only things to be seen not fixedly staring and glaring were the vines drooping under their loads of grapes.
These did occasionally wink a little, as the hot air barely moved their faint leaves.
The universal stare made the eyes ache.
Towards the distant blue of the Italian coast, indeed, it was a little relieved by light clouds of mist slowly rising from the evaporation of the sea, but it softened nowhere else.
Far away the dusty vines overhanging wayside cottages, and the monotonous wayside avenues of parched trees without shade, dropped beneath the stare of earth and sky.
So did the horses with drowsy bells, in long files of carts, creeping slowly towards the interior; so did their recumbent drivers, when they were awake, which rarely happened; so did the exhausted laborers in the fields.
Everything that lived or grew was oppressed by the glare; except the lizard, passing swiftly over rough stone walls, and cicada, chirping its dry hot chirp, like a rattle.
The very dust was scorched brown, and something quivered in the atmosphere as if the air itself were panting.
Blinds, shutters, curtains, awnings, were all closed and drawn to deep out the stare.
Grant it but a chink or a keyhole, and it shot in like a white-hot arrow.
Passage 12. Night
Night has fallen over the country.
Through the trees rises the red moon and the stars are scarcely seen.
In the vast shadow of night, the coolness and the dews descend.
I sit at the open window to enjoy them; and hear only the voice of the summer wind.
Like black hulks, the shadows of the great trees ride at anchor on the billowy sea of grass.
I cannot see the red and blue flowers, but I know that they are there.
Far away in the meadow gleams the silver Charles.
The tramp of horses’ hoofs sounds from the wooden bridge.
Then all is still save the continuous wind or the sound of the neighboring sea.
The village clock strikes; and I feel that I am not alone.
How different it is in the city!
It is late, and the crowd is gone.
You step out upon the balcony, and lie in the very bosom of the cool, dewy night as if you folded her garments about you.
Beneath lies the public walk with trees, like a fathomless, black gulf.
The lamps are still burning up and down the long street.
People go by with grotesque shadows, now foreshortened, and now lengthening away into the darkness and vanishing, while a new one springs up behind the walker, and seems to pass him revolving like the sail of a windmill.
The iron gates of the park shut with a jangling clang.
There are footsteps and loud voices; a tumult; a drunken brawl; an alarm of fire; then silence again.
And now at length the city is asleep, and we can see the night.
The belated moon looks over the roofs, and finds no one to welcome her.
The moonlight is broken.
It lies here and there in the squares and the opening of the streets angular like blocks of white marble.
Passage 13. Peace and Development: the Themes of Our Times
Peace and development are the themes of the times.
People across the world should join hands in advancing the lofty cause of peace and development of mankind.
A peaceful environment is indispensable for national, regional and even global development.
Without peace or political stability there would be no economic progress to speak of.
This has been fully proved by both the past and the present.
In today’s world, the international situation is, on the whole, moving towards relaxation.
However, conflicts and even local wars triggered by various factors have kept cropping up, and tension still remains in some areas.
All this has impeded the economic development of the countries and regions concerned, and has also adversely affected the world economy.
All responsible statesmen and governments must abide by the purposes of the UN Charter and the universally acknowledged norms governing international relations, and work for a universal, lasting and comprehensive peace.
Nobody should be allowed to cause tension or armed conflicts against the interests of the people.
There are still in this world a few interest groups, which always want to seek gains by creating tension here and there.
This is against the will of the majority of the people and against the trend of the times.
An enormous market demand can be created and economic prosperity promoted only when continued efforts are made to advance the cause of peace and development, to ensure that people around the world live and work in peace and contentment and focus on economic development and on scientific and technological innovation.
I hope that all of us here today will join hands with all other peace-loving people and work for lasting world peace and the common development and prosperity of all nations and regions.
Passage 14. Self-Esteem
Self-esteem is the combination of self-confidence and self-respect the conviction that you are competent to cope with life’s challenges and are worthy of happiness.
Self-esteem is the way you talk to yourself about yourself.
Self-esteem has two interrelated aspects; it entails a sense of personal efficacy and a sense of personal worth.
It is the integrated sum of self-confidence and self-respect.
It is the conviction that one is competent to live and worthy of living.
Our self-esteem and self-image are developed by how we talk to ourselves.
All of us have conscious and unconscious memories of all the times we felt bad or wrong they are part of the unavoidable scars of childhood.
This is where the critical voice gets started.
Everyone has a critical inner voice.
People with low self-esteem simply have a more vicious and demeaning inner voice.
Psychologists say that almost every aspect of our lives our personal happiness, success, relationships with others, achievement, creativity, dependencies are dependent on our level of self-esteem.
The more we have, the better we deal with things.
Positive self-esteem is important because when people experience it, they feel good and look good, they are effective and productive, and they respond to other people and themselves in healthy, positive, growing ways.
People who have positive self-esteem know that they are lovable and capable, and they care about themselves and other people.
They do not have to build themselves up by tearing other people down or by patronizing less competent people.
Our background largely determines what we will become in personality and more importantly in self-esteem.
Where do feelings of worthlessness come from?
Many come from our families, since more than 80% of our waking hours up to the age of eighteen are spent under their direct influence.
We are who we are because of where we’ve been.
We build our own brands of self-esteem from four ingredients: fate, the positive things life offers, the negative things life offers and our own decisions about how to respond to fate, the positives and the negatives.
Neither fate nor decisions can be determined by other people in our own life.
No one can change fate.
We can control our thinking and therefore our decisions in life.
Passage 15. Struggle for Freedom
It is not possible for me to express all that I feel of appreciation for what has been said and given to me.
I accept, for myself, with the conviction of having received far beyond what I have been able to give in my books.
I can only hope that the many books which I have yet to write will be in some measure a worthier acknowledgment than I can make tonight.
And, indeed, I can accept only in the same spirit in which I think this gift was originally given that it is a prize not so much for what has been done, as for the future.
Whatever I write in the future must, I think, be always benefited and strengthened when I remember this day.
I accept, too, for my country, the United States of America.
We are a people still young and we know that we have not yet come to the fullest of our powers.
This award, given to an American, strengthens not only one, but the whole body of American writers, who are encouraged and heartened by such generous recognition.
And I should like to say, too, that in my country it is important that this award has been given to a woman.
You who have already so recognized your own Selma Lagerlof, and have long recognized women in other fields, cannot perhaps wholly understand what it means in many countries that it is a woman who stands here at this moment.
But I speak not only for writers and for women, but for all Americans, for we all share in this.
I should not be truly myself if I did not, in my own wholly unofficial way, speak also of the people of China, whose life has for so many years been my life also, whose life, indeed, must always be a part of my life.
The minds of my own country and China, my foster country, are alike in many ways, but above all, alike in our common love of freedom.
And today more than ever, this is true, now when China’s whole being is engaged in the greatest of all the struggles, the struggle for freedom.
I have never admired China more than I do now, when I see her uniting as she has never before, against the enemy who threatens her freedom.
With this determination for freedom, which is in so profound a sense the essential quality of her nature,
I know that she is unconquerable.
Freedom it is today more than ever the most precious human possession.
We Sweden and the United States we have it still.
My country is young but it greets you with a peculiar fellowship, you whose earth is ancient and free.
Passage 16. Passing on Small Change
The pharmacist handed me my prescription, apologized for the wait, and explained that his register had already closed.
He asked if I would mind using the register at the front of the store.
I told him not to worry and walked up front, where one person was in line ahead of me, a little girl no more than seven, with a bottle of medicine on the counter.
She clenched a little green and white striped coin purse closely to her chest.
The purse reminded me of the days when, as a child,
I played dress-up in my grandma’s closet.
I’d march around the house in oversized clothes, drenched in costume jewelry and hats and scarves, talking grownup talk to anyone who would listen.
I remembered the thrill one day when I gave a pretend dollar to someone, and he handed back some real coins for me to put into my special purse.
Keep the change! he told me with a wink.
Now the clerk rang up the little girl’s medicine, while she shakily pulled out a coupon, a dollar bill and some coins.
I watched her blush as she tried to count her money, and I could see right away that she was about a dollar short.
With a quick wink to the clerk,
I slipped a dollar bill onto the counter and signaled the clerk to ring up the sale.
The child scooped her uncounted change into her coin purse, grabbed her package and scurried out the door.
As I headed to my car, I felt a tug on my shirt.
There was the girl, looking up at me with her big brown eyes.
She gave me a grin, wrapped her arms around my legs for a long moment then stretched out her little hand.
It was full of coins. Thank you, she whispered.
That’s okay, I answered.
I flashed her a smile and winked, Keep the change!
Passage 17. The Props to Help Man Endure (I)
I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work, a lifes work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit.
Not for glory and least of all, for profit, but to create out of the material of the human spirit something which did not exist before.
So this award is only mine in trust.
It would not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it, commensurate for the purpose and significance of its origin.
But I would like to do the same with the acclaim too by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and woman, already dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who will someday stand here where I am standing.
Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it.
There are no longer problems of the spirit, there is only the question;
When will I be blown up?
Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself, which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.
He must learn them again, he must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid, and teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart.
The old universal truths, lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed: love and honor and pity and pride, and compassion and sacrifice.
Passage 18. The Props to Help Man Endure (II)
Until he does so, he labors under a curse.
He writes not of love, but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope, and most of all, without pity or compassion.
His grief weaves on no universal bone, leaving no scars.
He writes not of the heart, but of the glands.
Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man.
I decline to accept the end of man.
It’s easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tireless in the last red and dying evening, that even then, there will still be one more sound that of his puny and inexhaustible voice, still talking.
I refuse to accept this.
I believe that man will not merely endure he will prevail.
He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion, and sacrifice, and endurance.
The poets, the writer’s duty is to write about these things.
It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage, and honor and hope and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past.
The poets’ voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.
Passage 19. What Is Immortal
To see the golden sun and the azure sky, the outstretched ocean, to walk upon the green earth, and to be lord of a thousand creatures, to look down giddy precipices or over distant flowery vales, to see the world spread out under one’s finger in a map, to bring the stars near, to view the smallest insects in a microscope, to read history, and witness the revolutions of empires and the succession of generations, to hear of the glory of Sidon and Tyre, of Babylon and Susa, as of a faded pageant, and to say all these were, and are now nothing, to think that we exist in such a point of time,and in such a corner of space, to be at once spectators and a part of the moving scene, to watch the return of the seasons, of spring and autumn, to hear.
The stock doves notes amid the forest deep,
That drowsy forest rustles to the sighing gale. to traverse desert wilderness, to listen to the dungeon’s gloom, or sit in crowded theatres and see life itself mocked, to feel heat and cold, pleasure and pain, right and wrong, truth and falsehood, to study the works of art and refine the sense of beauty to agony, to worship fame and to dream of immortality, to have read Shakespeare and Beloit to the same species as Sir Isaac Newton; to be and to do all this, and then in a moment to be nothing, to have it all snatched from one like a juggler ball or a phantasmagoria…
Passage 20. Suppose Someone Gave You a Pen
Suppose someone gave you a pen a sealed, solid-colored pen.
You couldn’t see how much ink it had.
It might run dry after the first few tentative words or last just long enough to create a masterpiece (or several) that would last forever and make a difference in the scheme of things.
You don’t know before you begin.
Under the rules of the game, you really never know.
You have to take a chance!
Actually, no rule of the game states you must do anything.
Instead of picking up and using the pen, you could leave it on a shelf or in a drawer where it will dry up, unused.
But if you do decide to use it, what would you do with it?
How would you play the game?
Would you plan and plan before you ever wrote a word?
Would your plans be so extensive that you never even got to the writing?
Or would you take the pen in hand, plunge right in and just do it, struggling to keep up with the twists and turns of the torrents of words that take you where they take you?
Would you write cautiously and carefully, as if the pen might run dry the next moment, or would you pretend or believe (or pretend to believe) that the pen will write forever and proceed accordingly?
And of what would you write:
Of love? Hate? Fun? Misery? Life? Death? Nothing? Everything?
Would you write to please just yourself? Or others?
Or yourself by writing for others?
Would your strokes be tremblingly timid or brilliantly bold?
Fancy with a flourish or plain?
Would you even write?
Once you have the pen, no rule says you have to write.Would you sketch? Scribble? Doodle or draw?Would you stay in or on the lines, or see no lines at all, even if they were there?
Or are they? There is a lot to think about here, isn’t there? Now, suppose someone gave you a life…