晨读英语美文 The Road to Happiness

The Road to Happiness

[00:10.29]If you look around at the men and women whom you can call happy,

[00:18.71]you will see that they all have certain things in common.

[00:22.65]The most important of these things is an activity

[00:27.02]which at most gradually builds up something

[00:30.52]that you are glad to see coming into existence.

[00:34.24]Women who take an instinctive pleasure in their children

[00:38.72]can get this kind of satisfaction out of bringing up a family.

[00:43.54]Artists and authors and men of science get happiness in this way

[00:48.90]if their own work seems good to them.

[00:51.41]But there are many humbler forms of the same kind of pleasure.

[00:56.77]Many men who spend their working life in the city

[01:00.16]devote their weekends to voluntary

[01:03.09]and unremunerated toil in their gardens,

[01:06.37]and when the spring comes,

[01:08.56]they experience all the joys of having created beauty.

[01:12.38]The whole subject of happiness has,

[01:15.55]in my opinion, been treated too solemnly.

[01:19.17]It had been thought that man cannot be happy

[01:22.66]without a theory of life or a religion.

[01:25.62]Perhaps those who have been rendered unhappy by a bad theory

[01:30.37]may need a better theory to help them to recover,

[01:33.87]just as you may need a tonic when you have been ill.

[01:37.82]But when things are normal a man should be healthy without a tonic

[01:42.62]and happy without a theory.

[01:44.81]It is the simple things that really matter.

[01:47.98]If a man delights in his wife and children,

[01:51.26]has success in work,

[01:53.12]and finds pleasure in the alternation of day and night,

[01:56.80]spring and autumn,

[01:58.16]he will be happy whatever his philosophy may be.

[02:01.87]If, on the other hand,

[02:04.06]he finds his wife fateful, his childrens noise unendurable,

[02:09.20]and the office a nightmare;

[02:11.90]if in the daytime he longs for night,

[02:14.68]and at night sighs for the light of day,

[02:17.36]then what he needs is not a new philosophy but a new regimen 

[02:21.95]a different diet, or more exercise, or what not.

[02:25.56]Man is an animal,

[02:27.20]and his happiness depends on his physiology more than he likes to think.

[02:32.35]This is a humble conclusion,

[02:34.75]but I cannot make myself disbelieve it.

[02:37.81]Unhappy businessmen, I am convinced,

[02:40.99]would increase their happiness more by walking six miles every day

[02:45.36]than by any conceivable change of philosophy.