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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 71. Beauty Is Meaningless
A young man sees a sunset and, unable to understand or to express the emotion that it rouses in him, concludes that it must be the gateway to a world that lies beyond.
It is difficult for any of us in moments of intense aesthetic experience to resist the suggestion that we are catching a glimpse of a light that shines down to us from a different realm of existence, different and, because the experience is intensively moving, in some way higher.
And, though the gleams blind and dazzle, yet they do convey a hint of beauty and serenity greater than we have known or imagined.
Greater too than we can describe, for language, which was invented to convey the meanings of this world, cannot readily be fitted to the uses of another.
That all great art has this power of suggesting a world beyond is undeniable.
In some moods, Nature shares it.
There is no sky in June so blue that it does not point forward to a bluer, no sunset so beautiful that it does not waken the vision of a greater beauty, a vision which passes before it is fully glimpsed, and in passing leaves an indefinable longing and regret.
But, if this world is not merely a bad joke, life a vulgar flare amid the cool radiance of the stars, and existence an empty laugh braying across the mysteries, if these intimations of something behind and beyond are not evil humor born of indigestion, or whimsies sent by the devil to mock and madden us, if, in a word, beauty means something, yet we must not seek to interpret the meaning.
If we glimpse the unutterable, it is unwise to try to utter it, nor should we seek to invest with significance that which we cannot grasp.
Beauty in terms of our human meanings is meaningless.
Passage 72 The Year of Wandering
Between the preparation and the work, the apprenticeship and the actual dealing with a task or an art, there comes, in the experience of many young men, a period of uncertainty and wandering which is often misunderstood and counted as time wasted, when it is, in fact, a period rich in full and free development.
It is as natural for ardent and courageous youth to wish to know what is in life, what it means, and what it holds for its children, as for a child to reach for and search the things that surround and attract it.
Behind every real worker in the world is a real man, and a man has a right to know the conditions under which he must live, and the choices of knowledge, power, and activity which are offered him.
In the education of many men and women, therefore, there comes the year of wandering; the experience of traveling from knowledge to knowledge and from occupation to occupation.
The forces which go to the making of a powerful man can rarely be adjusted and blended without some disturbance of relations and conditions.
This disturbance is sometimes injurious, because it affects the moral foundations upon which character rests; and for this reason the significance of the experience in its relation to development ought to be sympathetically studied.
The birth of the imagination and of the passions, the perception of the richness of life, and the consciousness of the possession of the power to master and use that wealth, create a critical moment in the history of youth, a moment richer in possibilities of all kinds than comes at any later period.
Agitation and ferment of soul are inevitable in that wonderful moment.
There are times when agitation is as normal as is self-control at other and less critical times.
The year of wandering is not a manifestation of aimlessness, but of aspiration, and that in its ferment and uncertainty youth is often guided to and finally prepared for its task.
Passage 73 Wake up Your Life
Years ago, when I started looking for my first job, wise advisers urged, Barbara, be enthusiastic! Enthusiasm will take you further than any amount of experience.
How right they were! Enthusiastic people can turn a boring drive into an adventure, extra work into opportunity and strangers into friends.
Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm, wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson.
An enthusiastic attitude enables us to hang in there when the going gets tough.
It’s the inner drive that whispers, I can do it! When others believe it can’t be done.
We are all born with wide-eyed, enthusiastic wonder as anyone knows who has ever seen an infant’s delight at the jingle of keys or the scurrying of a beetle.
It is this childlike wonder that gives enthusiastic people such a youthful air, whatever their age.
As poet and author Samuel Ullman once wrote,
Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul.
We need to live each moment wholeheartedly, with all our senses finding pleasure in the fragrance of a back-yard garden, the crayoned picture of a six-year-old, the enchanting beauty of a rainbow.
It is such an enthusiastic love of life that puts a sparkle in our eyes.
Passage 74 Wild Flowers
Each spring brings a new blossom of wildflowers in the ditches along the highway I travel daily to work.
There is one particular blue flower that has always caught my eyes.
I’ve noticed that it blooms only in the morning hours, the afternoon sun is too warm for it.
Every day for approximately two weeks, I see those beautiful flowers.
This spring, I started a wildflower garden in our yard.
I can look out of the kitchen window while doing the dishes and see the flowers.
I’ve often thought that those lovely blue flowers from the ditches would look great in that bed alongside other wildflowers.
Everyday I drove past the flowers thinking, I’ll stop on my way home and dig them.
Gee, I don’t want to get my good clothes dirty…
Whatever the reason, I never stopped to dig them.
My husband even gave me a folding shovel one year for my trunk to be used for that expressed purpose.
One day on my way home from work,
I was saddened to see that the highway department had mowed the ditches and the pretty blue flowers were gone.
I thought to myself, Way to go, you waited too long.
You should have done it when you first saw them blooming this spring.
A week ago we were shocked and saddened to learn that my oldest sister-in-law has a terminal brain tumor.
She is 20 years older than my husband and unfortunately, because of age and distance, we haven’t been as close as we all would have liked.
I couldn’t help but see the connection between the pretty blue flowers and the relationship between my husband’s sister and us.
I do believe that God has given us some time left to plant some wonderful memories that will bloom every year for us.
And yes, if I see the blue flowers again, you can bet I’ll stop and transplant them to my wildflower garden.
Passage 75 The Bread of Life
There are lives that have bread in abundance and yet are starved; with barns and warehouses filled, with shelves and larders laden they are empty and hungry.
No man need envy them; their feverish, restless whirl in the dust of publicity is but the search for a satisfaction never to be found in things.
They are called rich in a world where no others are more truly, pitiably poor; having all, they are yet lacking in all because they have neglected the things within.
The abundance of bread is the cause of many a man’s deeper hunger.
Having known nothing of the discipline that develops life’s hidden sources of satisfaction nothing of the struggle in which deep calls unto deep and the true life finds itself, he spends his days seeking to satisfy his soul with furniture, with houses and lands, with yachts and merchandise, seeking to feed his heart on things, a process of less promise and reason than feeding a snapping turtle on thoughts.
It takes many of us altogether too long to learn that you cannot find satisfaction so long as you leave the soul out of your reckoning.
If the heart be empty the life cannot be filled.
The flow must cease at the faucet if the fountains go dry.
The prime, the elemental necessities of our being are for the life rather than the body, its house. But, alas, how often out of the marble edifice issues the poor emaciated inmate, how out of the life having many things comes that which amounts to nothing.
The essential things are not often those which most readily strike our blunt senses.
We see the shell first.
To the undeveloped mind the material is all there is.
But looking deeper into life there comes an awakening to the fact and the significance of the spiritual, the feeling that the reason, the emotions, the joys and pains that have nothing to do with things, the ties that knit one to the infinite, all of which constitute the permanent elements of life.
Passage 76 An October Sunrise
I was up before the sunrise one October morning, and away through the wild and the woodland.
The rising of the sun was noble in the cold and warmth of it; peeping down the spread of light, he raised his shoulder heavily over the edge of Gray Mountain and wavering length of upland.
Beneath his gaze the dew-fogs dipped and crept to the hollow places, then stole away in line and column, holding skirts and clinging subtly at the sheltering corners where rock hung over grass-land, while the brave lines of the hills came forth, one beyond other gliding.
The woods arose, like drapery of awakened mountains, stately with a depth of awe, and memory of the tempests.
Autumn’s mellow hand was upon them, as they owned already, touched with gold and red and olive, and their joy towards the sun was less to a bridegroom than a father.
Yet before the floating impress of the woods could clear itself, suddenly the gladsome light leaped over hill and valley, casting amber, blue, and purple, and a tint of rich red rose, according to the scene they lit on, and the curtain flung around; yet all alike dispelling fear and the cloven hoof of darkness, all on the wings of hope advancing, and proclaiming, “God is here!”
Then life and joy sprang reassured from every crouching hollow; every flower and bud and bird had a fluttering sense of them, and all the flashing of God’s gaze merged into soft beneficence.
So, perhaps, shall break upon us that eternal morning, when crag and chasm shall be no more, neither hill and valley, nor Great Ocean; when glory shall not scare happiness, neither happiness envy glory; but all things shall arise, and shine in the light of the Father’s countenance, because itself is risen.
Passage 77 The Fascinating Moonrise
There is a hill near my home that I often climb at night.
The noise of the city is a far-off murmur.
In the hush of dark I share the cheerfulness of crickets and the confidence of owls.
But it is the drama of the moonrise that I come to see.
For that restores in me a quiet and clarity that the city spends too freely.
From this hill I have watched many moons rise.
Each one had its own mood.
There have been broad, confident harvest moons in autumn; shy, misty moons in spring; lonely, white winter moons rising into the utter silence of an ink-black sky and smoke-smudged orange moons over the dry fields of summer.
Each, like fine music, excited my heart and then calmed my soul.
But we, who live indoors, have lost contact with the moon.
The glare of street lights and the dust of pollution veil the night sky.
Though men have walked on the moon, it grows less familiar.
Few of us can say what time the moon will rise tonight.
Still, it tugs at our minds.
If we unexpectedly encounter the full moon, huge and yellow over the horizon, we are helpless but to stare back at its commanding presence.
And the moon has gifts to bestow upon those who watch.
I learned about its gifts one July evening in the mountains.
My car had mysteriously stalled, and I was stranded and alone.
The sun had set, and I was watching what seemed to be the bright-orange glow of a forest fire beyond a ridge to the east.
Suddenly, the ridge itself seemed to burst into flame.
Then, the rising moon, huge and red and grotesquely misshapen by the dust and sweat of the summer atmosphere, loomed up out of the woods.
Distorted thus by the hot breath of earth, the moon seemed ill-tempered and imperfect.
Dogs at nearby farmhouse barked nervously, as if this strange light had wakened evil spirits in the weeds.
But as the moon lifted off the ridge it gathered firmness and authority.
Its complexion changed from red, to orange, to gold, to impassive yellow.
It seemed to draw light out of the darkening earth, for as it rose, the hills and valleys below grew dimmer.
By the time the moon stood clear of the horizon, full-chested and round and of the colour of ivory, the valleys were deep shadows in the landscape.
The dogs, reassured that this was the familiar moon, stopped barking.
And all at once I felt a confidence and joy close to laughter.
The drama took an hour.
Moonrise is slow and serried with subtleties.
To watch it, we must slip into an older, more patient sense of time.
To watch the moon move inflexibly higher is to find an unusual stillness within ourselves.
Our imaginations become aware of the vast distance of space, the immensity of the earth and the huge improbability of our own existence.
We feel small but privileged.
Moonlight shows us none of life’s harder edges.
Hillsides seem silken and silvery, the oceans still and blue in its light.
In moonlight we become less calculating, more drawn to our feelings.
Passage 78 Human Thought Grows Like a Tree
Human thought is not a firework, ever shooting off fresh forms and shapes as it burns; it is a tree, growing very slowly you can watch it long and see no movement very silently, unnoticed.
It was planted in the world many thousand years ago, a tiny, sickly plant.
And men guarded it and tended it, and gave up life and fame to aid its growth.
In the hot days of their youth, they came to the gate of the garden and knocked, begging to be let in, and to be counted among the gardeners.
And their young companions outside called to them to come back, and play the man with bow and spear, and win sweet smiles from rosy lips, and take their part amid the feast, and dance, not stoop with wrinkled brows, at weaklings’ work.
And the passersby mocked them and called shame, and others cried out to stone them.
And still they stayed there laboring, that the tree might grow a little, and they died and were forgotten.
And the tree grew fair and strong.
The storms of ignorance passed over it, and harmed it not.
The fierce fires of superstition soared around it; but men leaped into the flames and beat them back, perishing, and the tree grew.
With the sweat of their brow men have nourished its green leaves.
Their tears have moistened the earth about it.
With their blood they have watered its roots.
The seasons have come and passed, and the tree has grown and flourished.
And its branches have spread far and high, and ever fresh shoots are bursting forth, and ever new leaves unfolding to the light.
But they are all part of the one tree the tree that was planted on the first birthday of the human race.
The stem that bears them springs from the gnarled old trunk that was green and soft when white-haired Time was a little child; the sap that feeds them is drawn up through the roots that twine and twist about the bones of the ages that are dead.
Passage 79 Learn to Live in the Present Moment
To a large degree, the measure of our peace of mind is determined by how much we are able to live in the present moment.
Irrespective of what happened yesterday or last year, or what may or may not happen tomorrow, the present moment is where you are always!
Without question, many of us have mastered the neurotic art of spending much of our lives worrying about a variety of things all at once.
We allow past problems and future concerns to dominate our present moments, so much so that we end up anxious, frustrated, depressed, and hopeless.
On the flip side, we also postpone our gratification, our stated priorities, and our happiness, often convincing ourselves that ‘someday will be better than today.
Unfortunately, the same mental dynamics that tell us to look toward the future will only repeat themselves so that someday never actually arrives.
John Lennon once said, Life is what’s happening while we are busy making, our children are busy growing up, the people we love are moving away busy dying, our bodies are getting out of shape, and our dreams are slipping away.
In short, we miss out on life.
Many people live as if life were a dress rehearsal for some later date.
It isn’t.
In fact, no one has a guarantee that he or she will be here tomorrow.
Now is the only time we have, and the only time that we have any control over.
When our attention is in the present moment, we push fear from our minds.
Fear is the concern over events that might happen in the future we won’t have enough money, our children will get into trouble, we will get old and die, whatever.
To combat fear, the best strategy is to learn to bring your attention back to the present.
Mark Twain said, I’ve lived through many terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.
I don’t think I can say it any better.
Practice keeping your attention on the here and now.
Your efforts will pay great dividends.
Passage 80. Success Is a Choice
All of us ought to be able to brace ourselves for the predictable challenges and setbacks that crop up every day.
If we expect that life won’t be perfect, we’ll be able to avoid that impulse to quit.
But even if you are strong enough to persist through the obstacle course of life and work, sometimes you will encounter an adverse event that will completely knock you on your back.
Whether it’s financial loss, the loss of respect of your peers or loved ones, or some other traumatic event in your life, these major setbacks leave you doubting yourself and wondering if things can ever change for the better again.
Adversity happens to all of us, and it happens all the time.
Some form of major adversity is either going to be there or it’s lying in wait just around the corner.
To ignore adversity is to succumb to the ultimate self-delusion.
But you must recognize that history full of examples of men and women who achieved greatness despite facing hurdles so steep that they easily could have crushed their spirit and left them lying in the dust.
Moses was a stutterer, yet he was called on to be the voice of God.
Abraham Lincoln overcame a difficult childhood, depression, the death of two sons, and constant ridicule during the Civil War to become arguably our greatest president ever.
Helen Keller made an impact on the world despite being deaf, dumb, and blind from an early age.
Franklin Roosevelt had polio.
There are endless examples.
These were people who not only looked adversity in the face but learned valuable lessons about overcoming difficult circumstances and were able to move ahead.