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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 61 it’s Never Too Late to Change
Age is no criterion when it comes to changing your life. In fact, it might be just the opposite.
The older we get, the more we must change.
Change is what keeps us fresh and innovative.
Change is what keeps us from getting stale and stuck in a rut.
Change is what keeps us young. This is not easy.
When we are young it’s easy to change and experiment with different things.
The older we get the more set in our ways we become.
We’ve found out what our comfort level is, and we all want to stay in it.
We don’t want to be risk takers anymore, because risk frightens us, and simply not changing seems so easy.
We must fight through this.
We must look fear straight in the eye and take it on.
We must tell ourselves that we have too much talent, too much wisdom, too much value not to change.
I believe that Jim, who is on my staff, is one of the best assistant coaches in the country.
But I almost didn’t hire him three years ago because I thought that psychologically he was too “old,” that he had lost the drive and passion that an assistant coach needs.
Three years ago he was forty, and I thought he might have spent too many Saturday afternoons at the country club, that he wasn’t going to get in the trenches anymore, like the younger assistant coaches do.
But Jim told me that he couldn’t wait to get down in the trenches again.
So I hired him, and he’s been an integral part of our success.
There is a conventional wisdom in coaching that once you’ve been a head coach you can’t enthusiastically go back to being an assistant again and still have the same passion as before.
Jim didn’t buy into that.
He didn’t let his “old age” get in his way.
He was ready when opportunity came calling.
He reestablished a work ethic second to none with the eagerness of a person right out of college.
And I’m thankful for what he did, because he played such an essential role in our championship season.
This is what we all must do.
We must realize that it’s never too late to begin making changes that can transform our life.
Passage 62 The Price of Perfection
Gold may depreciate, stocks rise or fall, and business values change so as to leave the market in panic, but every man on the street or in the store knows that one value forever remains permanent, unvarying, and that is character.
Every other asset may be swept away and success still achieved if this remain; every other aid may be at its best and failure only await him who lacks the wealth of character.
Character is that of which reputation is but the echo, often mistaken and misleading.
Character is the last, the ultimate, value of life.
It is the trend of the whole being towards the best.
It is the passion and power that holds one true despite all persuasion.
It is the one thing worth having, because upon it all other values depend.
This asset comes not to a man by accident.
He who is rich in character, whose success in many ways is built upon his resources in this way, does not just simply happen to be good, true, and square.
There is a price to character; it costs more than any other thing, for it is worth more than all other things.
Essentially it never is inherited, but always acquired by processes often slow and toilsome and at great price.
If you would be perfect you must pay the price of perfection.
Unless the passion of life is this perfection it never will be your possession.
Dreams of ideal goodness only waste the hours in which it might have been achieved.
No man ever finds character in his sleep.
The education of the heart is a thing even more definite than the education of the head.
The school of character has an infinite variety of courses and an unending curriculum.
This does not mean that this prize of eternity falls only to those who devote themselves wholly to self-culture, to the salvation of their own souls.
The best lives have thought little of themselves, but they have lived for the ends of the soul, to help men to better living, to save them from the things that blight and damn the soul.
Like the Leader of men they have found the life unending by laying down their lives, paying the full price, selling all in order that right and truth and honour and purity, love and kindness and justice might remain to man.
Passage 63. The Definition of a Gentleman
Hence it is, that it is almost a definition of a gentleman, to say he is one who never inflicts pain.
This description is both refined and, as far as it goes, accurate.
He is mainly occupied in merely removing the obstacles which hinder the free and unembarrassed action of those about him; and he concurs with their movements rather than takes the initiative himself.
His benefits may be considered as parallel to what are called comforts or conveniences in arrangements of a personal nature: like an easy chair or a good fire, which do their part in dispelling cold and fatigue, though nature provides both means of rest and animal heat without them.
He is never mean or little in his disputes, never takes unfair advantage, never mistakes personalities or sharp sayings for arguments or insinuates evil which he dare not say out.
From a long-sighted prudence, he observes the maxim of the ancient sage, that we should ever conduct ourselves towards our enemy as if he were one day to be our friend.
He has too much good sense to be affronted at insults, he is too well employed to remember injuries, and too engaged to bear malice.
He is patient, tolerant, and resigned, on philosophical principles; he submits to pain, because it is inevitable, to the death of family members, because it is irreparable, and to death, because it is his destiny.
If he engages in controversy of any kind, his disciplined intellect preserves him from the blundering discourtesy of better, though less educated minds; who, like blunt weapons, tear and hack instead of cutting clean, who mistake the point in argument, waste their strength on trifles, misconceive their adversary, and leave the question more involved than they find it.
He may be right or wrong in his opinion, but he is too clear-headed to be unjust; he is as simple as he is forcible, and as brief as he is decisive.
Nowhere shall we find greater candor, consideration, indulgence: he throws himself into the minds of his opponents, he accounts for their mistakes.
He knows the weakness of human reason as well as its strength, its province and its limits.
Passage 64 Mirror Mirror What Do I See?
A loving person lives in a loving world.
A hostile person lives in a hostile world.
Everyone you meet is your mirror.
Mirrors have a very particular function.
They reflect the image in front of them.
Just as a physical mirror serves as the vehicle to reflection, so do all of the people in our lives.
When we love someone, it’s a reflection of loving ourselves.
Oftentimes, when we meet someone new, we feel as if we’ve known each other for a long time.
That feeling can come from sharing similarities.
We are comfortable because part of ourselves is being reflected.
Just as the mirror or other person can be a positive reflection, it is more likely that we’ll notice it when it has a negative connotation.
Frequently, when we dislike qualities in other people, ironically, it’s usually the mirror that’s speaking to us. Example: Several years ago, I joined a friend who had invited several other friends as well.
One woman, Laura continuously dominated the conversation.
It was particularly annoying as I felt there was little opportunity to get to know the other people.
It wasn’t until several weeks had passed that I questioned and couldn’t understand why was I so disturbed by Laura’s behavior as I didn’t have to be friends or spend more time with her.
Finally, it hit me! I saw aspects of those same traits in me.
I realized that the reason we met was for me to hold up the mirror and see myself behaving in an unfavorable manner.
So I began questioning myself further each time I encountered someone that I didn’t particularly like.
Each time, I asked myself “What is it about that person that I don’t like?”
And then “Is there something similar in me?
In every instance, and sometimes I had to really get very introspective, I could see a piece of that quality in me.
At times we meet someone new and feel distant, disconnected, or disgusted.
Although we don’t want to believe it and it’s not easy or desirable to look furtherit can be a great learning lesson to figure out what part of the person is being reflected in you.
It’s simply just another way to create more self-awareness.
Passage 65 Tomorrow Will Be a Better Day
I’m 16. The other night while I was busy thinking about important social issues, like what to do over the weekend, I overheard my parents talking about my future.
My dad was upset not the usual stuff that he and Mom worry about, like which college I’m going to, how far away it is from home and how much it’s going to cost.
Instead, he was upset about the world his generation is turning over to mine.
He sounded like this: “There will be a pandemic that kills millions, a devastating energy crisis, a horrible worldwide depression and a nuclear explosion set off in anger.”
As I lay on the living room couch, starting to worry about the future my father was describing,
I found myself looking at some old family photos.
There was a picture of my grandfather in his uniform.
He was a member of the war class.
Next to his picture were photos of my great-grandparents.
Seeing those pictures made me feel a lot better.
I believe tomorrow will be better, not worse.
Those pictures helped me understand why.
I considered some of the awful things my grandparents and great-grandparents had seen in their lifetimes: two world wars, killer flu, and a nuclear bomb.
But they saw other things, too, better things: the end of two world wars, the polio vaccine, and passage of the civil rights laws.
I believe that my generation will see better things, too that we will witness the time when AIDS is cured and cancer is defeated; when the Middle East will find peace, and the Cubs win the World Series probably only once.
I will see things as inconceivable to me today as a moon shot was to my grandfather when he was 16, or the Internet to my father when he was 16.
Ever since I was a little kid, whenever I’ve had a lousy day, my dad would put his arm around me and promise me that “tomorrow will be a better day.”
I challenged my father once, “How do you know that?”
He said, “I just do.” I believed him.
As I listened to my Dad talking that night, so worried about what the future holds for me and my generation, I wanted to put my arm around him, and tell him what he always told me: “Don’t worry Dad, tomorrow will be a better day.”
Passage 66 Kindness of Strangers
Our son Owen was born just as Hurricane Katrina approached the Gulf Coast.
Two days later, as Katrina neared landfall, Owen began suffering seizures; he’d had a stroke.
I didn’t follow the catastrophe on the Gulf Coast as closely as I might have, but those weeks taught me some things about catastrophe and about the kindness of strangers.
All catastrophes are personal.
Some in the Gulf Coast sought survival; some sought to help others.
Some prayed; some prayed upon others.
At the hospital, we watched our son Owen sleep.
Despite the tubes dripping and the monitors beeping, he still slept his baby sleep.
My wife asked for the pastor; I asked for the doctor.
She prayed for him. I held the CAT scan up to the light and searched for answers.
No one can know what you will feel or fear in a time of need, but I learned that in this, the most difficult time of my life, the people our family depended upon most were people we had never met, people who we would likely never see again strangers.
We depended upon strangers, strangers who knew their duty was to help others.
We depended upon the nurses who cared so well for our son, who cooed to him and caressed him, who watched me hold him through the night and never seemed to notice how ugly a man is when he cries.
We depended upon the hostel that gave us a place to stay near the hospital, upon the members of my union who believe caring for our child’s health should not ruin us, upon the doctors and clerks and ambulance drivers.
We depended upon a commitment made to helping others.
This commitment is a web that holds us together in times of need.
By the time we took Owen home, the worst effects of Katrina were evident.
I watched the images from the Gulf Coast, images of communities, lives and families whose fabric had been torn apart.
I thought of that web of strangers that had embraced my family in our time of need, and that it is the most fortunate among us who are served best by it.
I can only hope this web will be strong enough, that it will be spun wide, that it will hold and care for many, that we can all depend upon the kindness of strangers.
Passage 67 The Pain of Youth(1)
It is the habit of the poets, and of many who are poets neither in vision nor in faculty, to speak of youth as if it were a period of unshadowed gaiety and pleasure, with no consciousness of responsibility and no sense of care.
The freshness of feeling, the delight in experience, the joy of discovery, the unspent vitality which welcomes every morning as a challenge to one’s strength, invest youth with a charm which art is always striving to preserve, and which men who have parted from it remember with a sense of pathos; for the morning of life comes but once, and when it fades something goes which never returns.
There are ample compensations, there are higher joys and deeper insights and relationships; but a magical charm which touches all things and turns them to gold, vanishes with the morning.
All this is true of youth, which in many ways symbolises the immortal part of man’s nature, and must be, therefore, always beautiful and sacred to him.
But it is untrue that the sky of youth has no clouds and the spirit of youth no cares; on the contrary, no period of life is in many ways more painful.
The finer the organisation and the greater the ability, the more difficult and trying the experiences through which the youth passes.
George Eliot has pointed out a striking peculiarity of childish grief in the statement that the child has no background of other griefs against which the magnitude of its present sorrow may be measured.
While that sorrow lasts it is complete, absolute, and hopeless, because the child has no memory of other trials endured, of other sorrows survived.
In this fact about the earliest griefs lies the source also of the pains of youth.
The young man is an undeveloped power; he is largely ignorant of his own capacity, often without inward guidance towards his vocation; he is unadjusted to the society in which he must find a place for himself.
He is full of energy and aspiration, but he does not know how to expend the one or realise the other.
His soul has wings, but he cannot fly, because, like the eagle, he must have space on the ground before he rises in the air.
Passage 68 The Pain of Youth (2)
There is no test of character more severe or difficult to bear than the suspense of waiting.
The man who can act eases his soul under the greatest calamities; but he who is compelled to wait, unless he be of hardy fibre, eats his heart out in a futile despair.
If the troops were compelled to halt under the relentless guns of masked batteries, they would be caught up in the stir of charge.
It will lead to the demoralisation and scatter of the troop, which would result in great loss.
Now, the characteristic trial of youth is this experience of waiting at a moment when the whole nature craves expression and the satisfaction of action.
The greater the volume of energy in the man who has yet to find his vocation and place, the more trying the ordeal.
There are moments in the life of the youth when it seems impossible to realise any of its dreams and the splendour of the dreams filled the young soul with despair.
The clearer the consciousness of the possession of the power, the stronger the fear that he could not find ways to contribute to the society.
The reality of this crisis in spiritual experience the adjustment between the personality and the physical, social, and industrial order in which it must find its place and task is the measure of its possible painfulness.
His pain has its roots in his ignorance of his own powers and of the world.
He strives again and again to put himself in touch with organized work; he takes up one task after another in a fruitless endeavour to succeed.
He does not know what he is fitted to do, and he turns helplessly from one form of work for which he has no faculty to another for which he has less.
His friends begin to think of him as a ne’er-do-well; and, more pathetic still, the shadow of failure begins to darken his own spirit.
And yet it may be that in this halting, stumbling, ineffective human soul, vainly striving to put its hand to its task, there is some rare gift, some splendid talent, waiting for the ripe hour and the real opportunity!
In such a crisis sympathetic comprehension is invaluable, but it is rarely given, and the youth works out his problem in isolation.
Passage 69 Failure Is a Good Thing
Last week, my granddaughter started kindergarten, and I wished her success.
I was lying.
What I actually wish for her is failure.
I believe in the power of failure.
Success is boring.
Success is proving that you can do something that you already know you can do, or doing something correctly the first time, which can often be a problematic victory.
First-time success is usually a fluke.
First-time failure, by contrast, is expected; it is the natural order of things.
Failure is how we learn.
I have been told of an African phrase describing a good cook as “she who has broken many pots.”
If you’ve spent enough time in the kitchen to have broken a lot of pots, probably you know a lot about cooking.
I once had a dinner with a group of chefs, and they spent time comparing knife wounds and burn scars.
They knew how much credibility their failures gave them.
I earn my living by writing a daily newspaper column.
Each week I am aware that one column is going to be the worst column.
I don’t set out to write it; I try my best every day.
I have learned to cherish that column.
A successful column usually means that I am treading on familiar ground, going with the tricks that work or dressing up popular sentiments in fancy words.
Often in my inferior columns, I am trying to pull off something I’ve never done before, something I’m not even sure can be done.
My younger daughter is a trapeze artist.
She spent three years putting together an act.
She did it successfully for years.
There was no reason for her to change the act- but she did anyway.
She said she was no longer learning anything new and she was bored. So she changed the act.
She risked failure and profound public embarrassment in order to feed her soul.
My granddaughter is a perfectionist.
She will feel her failures, and I will want to comfort her.
But I will also, I hope, remind her of what she learned, and how she can do whatever it is better next time.
I hope I can tell her, though, that it’s not the end of the world.
Indeed, with luck, it is the beginning.
Passage 70. Inaugural Speech
In your hands, my fellow citizens, more than mine, will rest the final success or failure of our cause.
Since this country was founded, each generation of Americans has been summoned to give testimony to its national loyalty.
The graves of young Americans who answered the call to service surround the globe.
Now the trumpet summons us again not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need; not as a call to battle, though in battle we are, but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation, a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease and war itself.
Can we forge against these enemies a grand and global alliance, North and South, East and West, that can assure a fruitful life for all mankind?
Will you join in that historic effort?
In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger.
I do not shrink from this responsibility I welcome it.
I do not believe that any of us would exchange places with any other people or any other generation.
The energy, the belief, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor will light our country and all who serve it and the glow from that fire can truly light the world.
And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you ask what you can do for your country.
My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.
Finally, whether you are citizens of America or citizens of the world, ask of us here the same high standards of strength and sacrifice which we ask of you.
With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth God’s work must truly be our own.