Directions: Read the following passage carefully and then
translate the underlined sentences into Chinese.
The greatest results in life are usually attained by simple means, and the
exercise of ordinary qualities. 1. The common life of every day, with its
cares, necessities, and duties, affords ample opportunity for acquiring
experience of the best kind: and its most beaten-paths provide the true worker
with abundant scope for effort and room for sell-improvement. The road of human
welfare lies along the old highway of steadfast well-doing: and they who are the
most persistent, and work in the truest spirit, will usually be the most
successful. Fortune has often been blamed for her blindness;
but fortune is not so blind as men are. Those who look into practical life will
find that fortune is usually on the side of the industrious, as the winds and
waves are on the side of the best navigators. In the pursuit of even the highest
branches of human inquiry, the commoner qualities are found the most
useful--such as common sense, attention, application, and
perseverance. 2. Genius may not be necessary, though even
genius of the highest sort does not disdain the use of these ordinary qualities.
The very greatest men have been among the least believers in the power of
genius, and as worldly wise and persevering as successful men of the commoner
sort. Some have even defined genius to be only common sense intensified.
A distinguished teacher and president of a college spoke of it as the
power of making efforts. John Foster held it to be the power of lighting one’s
own fire. Buffon said of genius "it is patience". Newton’s was
unquestionably a mind of the very highest order, and yet, when asked by
what means he had worked out his extraordinary discoveries, he modestly
answered, "By always thinking unto them. " At another time he thus expressed his
method of study : "I keep the subject continually before me, and wait till the
first dawnings open slowly by little and little into a full and clear light. "
3. It was in Newton’s case, as in every other, only by diligent application
and perseverance that his great reputation was achieved. Even his recreation
consisted in change of study, laying down one subject to take up another. To
Dr. Bentley he said, "If I have done the public any service, it is due to
nothing but industry and patient thought. " 4. The
extraordinary results effected by dint of sheer industry and perseverance, have
led many distinguished men to doubt whether the gift of genius be so exceptional
an endowment as it is usually supposed to be. Thus Voltaire held that
it is only a very slight line of separation that divides the man of genius
from the man of ordinary mould. Beccaria was even of opinion that all men
might be poets and orators, and Reynolds that they might be painters and
sculptors. If this were really so, that stolid Englishman might not have been so
very far wrong after all, who, on Canova’s death, inquired of his brother
whether it was "his intention to carry on the business". Locke,
Helvetius, and Diderot believed that all men have an equal aptitude for genius,
and that what some are able to effect, under the laws which regulate the
operations of the intellect, must also be within the reach of others who, under
like circumstances, apply themselves to like pursuits. 5. But while admitting
to the fullest extent the wonderful achievements of labor, and recognizing the
fact that men of the most distinguished genius have invariably been found the
most indefatigable workers, it must nevertheless be sufficiently obvious that,
without the original endowment of heart and brain, no amount of labor,
however well applied, could have produced a Shake-speare, a Newton,
a Beethoven, or a Michelangelo. Dalton, the chemist,
repudiated the notion of his being "a genius", attributing everything
which he had accomplished to simple industry and accumulation. John Hunter said
of himself, "My mind is like a beehive; but full as it is of buzz and apparent
confusion, it is yet full of order and regularity, and food collected with
incessant industry from the choicest stores of nature. " We have, indeed,
but to glance at the biographies of great men to find that the most
distinguished inventors, artists, thinkers, and workers of all kinds, owe their
success, in a great measure, to their indefatigable industry and application.
They were men who turned all things to Gold-even time itself.