Adeline1006G备考日志~不迁怒，不贰过

AdelineShenUID: 2630498

strike it rich  露富

doing good as well as doing well  应该是来自一句谚语: doing well by doing good

creative destruction : this term is used to describe the process of transformation that accompanies radical innovation.[1] In Schumpeter's vision of capitalism, innovative entry by entrepreneurs was the force that sustained long-term economic growth, even as it destroyed the value of established companies that enjoyed some degree of monopoly power.

Keynesian economics: a macroeconomic theory based on the ideas of 20th-century British economist John Maynard Keynes. Keynesian economics argues that private sector decisions sometimes lead to inefficient macroeconomic outcomes and therefore advocates active policy responses by the public sector, including monetary policy actions by the central bank and fiscal policy actions by the government to stabilize output over the business cycle. 主张宏观调控~   

work hand in glove 密切合作

roam 漫步，漫游

evangelist n.传道者

pressure group an organization that seeks to influence political decisions

spread the gospel

corner shop 小店

pedigree = lineage 血统

Atlas  被罚承受天地之重的巨人

geek n. 怪人

gizmo=gadget

suit n.a business executive

roll-call 点名

bagel 甜甜圈~~

radically  adv.激进地

short trousers  小孩儿穿的裤？

franchise v.授予特许经销权

no-frills discount   no frills is a term used to describe any service or product for which the non-essential features have been removed to keep the price low. The use of the term "frills" refers to a style of fabric decoration.
keep sb. on their toes

Jack Welch tried to transform General Electric from a Goliath into a collection of entreperneurial Davids
用了一个大卫与歌利亚的典故

Such men belong firmly in the pantheon of entrepreneurs.
pantheon 万神殿 很喜欢这句


Procter & Gamble tries to get half of its innovations from outside its own labs.
Microsoft works closely with a network of 750,000 small companies around the world.
Some 3,500 companies have grown up in Nokia’s shadow.
这三句说的差不多一个意思，但是说法不同

public sector ：sometimes referred to as the state sector is a part of the state that deals with either the production, delivery and allocation of goods and services by and for the government or its citizens, whether national, regional or local/municipal.

also-rans （竞赛、竞选等的）失败者

path-breaking  开创性的

AdelineShenUID: 2630498

The lights may have gone out on Wall Street, but Silicon Valley continues to burn bright. High-flyers (有野心的人）from around the world still flock to America’s universities and clamour(吵闹，喧哗) to work for Google and Microsoft.这个比喻相当生动~~

think tank 智囊团

AdelineShenUID: 2630498

This report reminds me of the competition I have taken part in this semester about entrepreneurship. Innovation is the source of entrepreneurship, just as the author puts here. The global recession is not necessarily a strike on the entrepreneurs. In contrast, for the true heroes, it is a wonderful opportunity. With an original idea and the strong desire to put it into practice, true heroes in commercial field might create creation and change the economic world.

There is a famous saying: the safest place is where is the most dangerous. It is also true in this way: the worst situation in economy hides the largest opportunity there. Bill Gates created the Microsoft during recession.Genentech, Gap and The Limited were all founded during recessions. Only by jumping into the house of the tiger can one catch the baby tiger. Only by creative thinking and innovative behavior in bravety can one go to the peak of the entrepreneur mountain, regardless of the global recession and the seemingly difficulty we are meeting.

The most important thing entrepreneurs shoud do today is to try to find the great opportunity in the recession economy with innovation and be confident to overcome the trouble. A bright future is on the way!~

Sigh~ I am hungry now~

AdelineShenUID: 2630498

Beauty(节选）

By Scott Russell Sanders

Judging from the scientists I know, including Eva and Ruth, and those whom I've read about, you can't pursue the laws of nature very long without bumping into(to encounter especially by chance) beauty. "I don't know if it's the same beauty you see in the sunset," a friend tells me, "but it feels the same." This friend is a physicist, who has spent a long career deciphering what must be happening in the interior of stars. He recalls for me his thrill on grasping for the first time Dirac's equations describing quantum mechanics, or those of Einstein describing relativity. "They're so beautiful," he says, "you can see immediately they have to be true. Or at least on the way toward truth." I ask him what makes a theory beautiful, and he replies, "Simplicity, symmetry, elegance, and power."

Why nature should conform to theories we find beautiful is far from obvious. The most incomprehensible thing about the universe, as Einstein said, is that it's comprehensible. How unlikely, that a short-lived biped on a two-bit planet should be able to gauge the speed of light, lay bare the structure of an atom, or calculate the gravitational tug of a black hole. We're a long way from understanding everything, but we do understand a great deal about how nature behaves. Generation after generation, we puzzle out(苦苦思索而弄清楚或解决） formulas, test them, and find, to an astonishing degree, that nature agrees. An architect draws designs on flimsy paper, and her buildings stand up through earthquakes. We launch a satellite into orbit and use it to bounce messages from continent to continent. The machine on which I write these words embodies hundreds of insights into the workings of the material world, insights that are confirmed by every burst of letters on the screen, and I stare at that screen through lenses that obey the laws of optics first worked out in detail by Isaac Newton.

By discerning patterns in the universe, Newton believed, he was tracing the hand of God. Scientists in our day have largely abandoned the notion of a Creator as an unnecessary hypothesis, or at least an untestable one. While they share Newton's faith that the universe is ruled everywhere by a coherent set of rules, they cannot say, as scientists, how these particular rules came to govern things. You can do science without believing in a divine Legislator, but not without believing in laws.

I spent my teenage years scrambling up the mountain of mathematics. Midway up the slope, however, I staggered to a halt, gasping in the rarefied air, well before I reached the heights where the equations of Einstein and Dirac would have made sense. Nowadays I add, subtract, multiply, and do long division when no calculator is handy, and I can do algebra and geometry and even trigonometry in a pinch, but that is about all that I've kept from the language of numbers. Still, I remember glimpsing patterns in mathematics that seemed as bold and beautiful as a skyful of stars.

I'm never more aware of the limitations of language than when I try to describe beauty. Language can create its own loveliness, of course, but it cannot deliver to us the radiance we apprehend in the world, any more than a photograph can capture the stunning swiftness of a hawk or the withering power of a supernova. Eva's wedding album holds only a faint glimmer of the wedding itself. All that pictures or words can do is gesture beyond themselves toward the fleeting glory that stirs our hearts. So I keep gesturing.

"All nature is meant to make us think of paradise," Thomas Merton observed. Because the Creation puts on a nonstop show, beauty is free and inexhaustible, but we need training in order to perceive more than the most obvious kinds. Even fifteen billion years or so after the Big Bang, echoes of that event still linger in the form of background radiation, only a few degrees above absolute zero. Just so, I believe, the experience of beauty is an echo of the order and power that permeate the universe. To measure background radiation, we need subtle instruments; to measure beauty, we need alert intelligence and our five keen senses.

Anyone with eyes can take delight in a face or a flower. You need training, however, to perceive the beauty in mathematics or physics or chess, in the architecture of a tree, the design of a bird's wing, or the shiver of breath through a flute. For most of human history, the training has come from elders who taught the young how to pay attention. By paying attention, we learn to savor all sorts of patterns, from quantum mechanics to patchwork quilts.

This predilection（prejudise) brings with it a clear evolutionary advantage, for the ability to recognize patterns helped our ancestors to select mates, find food, avoid predators. But the same advantage would apply to all species, and yet we alone compose symphonies and crossword puzzles, carve stone into statues, map time and space. Have we merely carried our animal need for shrewd perceptions to an absurd extreme? Or have we stumbled onto(偶然碰到，恰巧碰到） a deep congruence between the structure of our minds and the structure of the universe?

I am persuaded the latter is true. I am convinced there's more to beauty than biology, more than cultural convention. It flows around and through us in such abundance, and in such myriad forms, as to exceed by a wide margin any mere evolutionary need. Which is not to say that beauty has nothing to do with survival: I think it has everything to do with survival. Beauty feeds us from the same source that created us. It reminds us of the shaping power that reaches through the flower stem and through our own hands. It restores our faith in the generosity of nature. By giving us a taste of the kinship between our own small minds and the great Mind of the Cosmos, beauty reassures us that we are exactly and wonderfully made for life on this glorious planet, in this magnificent universe. I find in that affinity a profound source of meaning and hope. A universe so prodigal of beauty may actually need us to notice and respond, may need our sharp eyes and brimming hearts and teeming minds, in order to close the circuit of Creation

AdelineShenUID: 2630498

Since I am interested in the auther Scott Qussell, I search the name by google and find an interview with him, which makes me excited to know that he has just finished a book about environment protection and he is a professor of  Indiana University.

I’ve had some great teachers over the years, but none quite like Scott Russell Sanders, the gentle guru of Bloomington, Indiana, and a leading light of Midwestern environmentalism. To call him articulate doesn’t begin to do justice. He exudes a sort of intellectual clarity, in both his works of non-fiction and fiction and in his teaching at Indiana University. (As a former student, I’m a thoroughly biased source.)
Sanders’ book Staying Put offers a countercultural vision of what it means to live rooted in a place—not far from Wendell Berry country, geographically or philosophically. A Private History of Awe charts his development-of-conscience growing up on a military base during the civil rights and Vietnam eras. It’s one of the best memoirs I’ve ever read.
His new book, A Conservationist Manifesto (released this week), presents a host of arguments for why we’re better off thinking of ourselves as citizens and stewards than consumers in the face of ecological disaster. Here’s our recent phone conversation about the book.
Q. What led you to write A Conservationist Manifesto?
A. For the first time in human history, we are causing damage to the entire living system of the planet, and we know that we are doing so. We don’t have models for how to respond, because none of our ancestors ever had to contend with damage on this scale. I’m trying to identify some of the sources we possess within our spiritual and intellectual traditions, and within science and art, for responding in creative ways to our present environmental predicament.
Q. You do a lot of describing a civic “good life”—through describing what you love best about Bloomington, through describing the work of unsung conservationists, and in your essay that responds to [James Howard] Kunstler’s Geography of Nowhere with a “Geography of Somewhere.” Why do you take this on?
A. We live in a society that places so much emphasis on private wealth that we forget how important the common wealth—the realm of shared natural and cultural goods—is for our happiness, our wholeness, and our well-being. Advertising addresses the isolated individual, but we don’t exist in isolation. We exist as members of relationships, within families, communities, neighborhoods, and workplaces. I write about that communal dimension of our existence because the private dimension is more than adequately dealt with by the popular media.
Q. Sure. It seems like an artistic challenge as well to make successful towns and societies as compelling as dysfunctional ones.
A. None of us wants to live in the midst of trouble, but we do want to read about it and watch it on screen. It’s easier to make trouble and failure artistically captivating. So there is this paradox. I faced a similar challenge in my book A Private History of Awe, where I wrote about an enduring and loving marriage. It’s a lot harder to engage people in reading about something that works well over a long period of time than to engage them with something that breaks down in catastrophic and sensational ways.
Most environmental news describes breakdown of one sort or another. Of course, it’s crucial for us to be aware of such news. At the same time, we need to know about the creative and promising responses that people are making, the various “arks” people are building to carry what we love and what we need through this time of troubles.
Q. You write about settling in southern Indiana in 1971 and trying to be a conscientious citizen since then. How have you seen the environmental movement, or attitudes toward conservation, change in the Midwest over that time?
A. During my nearly 40 years here in southern Indiana I have seen a rising concern about the preservation of forests, the restoration of wetlands, the cleansing of rivers, and the healing of communities.  As I travel around the Midwest, I meet people everywhere who are involved with farmers’ markets, with land trusts, with community-supported agriculture, with schoolyard gardens, and with other efforts to protect and restore portions of the natural world. Every community I visit has organizations devoted to looking after the land and waters, fostering organic gardening, reducing carbon emissions, or other environmental causes. I find that very encouraging.
The central section of A Conservationist Manifesto focuses on Indiana, because this is the place I know most deeply. For the benefit of readers who live elsewhere and who may think of the Midwest as short on wild beauty and environmental consciousness, I wish to call attention to the natural history of my home region and to the conservation efforts underway here.
Q. Your vision about how we ought to live in relation to the natural world stands very much in the tradition of Henry Thoreau, John Muir, Wendell Berry, Annie Dillard, Rachel Carson, Aldo Leopold, and such. And you make it pretty clear in your writing that you’re working from within that tradition. I’m curious about how you make your message your own.
A. Well, certainly I have drawn on the great tradition of American nature writing, and I honor those predecessors. But I also feel that I’m doing something different. That tradition was created primarily by men who explored nature in solitude. They made excursions into the natural world, lived beside ponds or climbed trees in the midst of storms or canoed wild rivers, and then returned to write about the experience. I treasure their work.  But I am not solitary.  I write about living in the midst of family, community, and human structures.  I see the natural world not as a wild place out there, but as the matrix from which we arise and in which we dwell.  We breathe it, drink it, eat it, and wear it; we are sustained by nature with every heartbeat.
Among our contemporaries, Wendell Berry and Gary Snyder, in particular, have written powerfully about human relationships embedded within nature.  They exemplify the sort of writer I’ve tried to be, more fully than such earlier figures as Thoreau or Muir.
Q. I want to ask about reverence and irreverence. You make a case for sort of rediscovering reverence—in dealing with the natural world, in dealing with other humans—Grist tries to make a case for irreverence in approaching deadly serious topics. What gives?
A. Reverence is a profoundly important attitude. Not toward ourselves or our work, but toward the power that we see manifest in the natural world and that we feel moving within us.  Reverence toward that shaping power seems to me the deepest and truest emotion the universe calls for. That awareness runs through A Private History of Awe, as well as A Conservationist Manifesto.  We need to recover a sense of the ultimate value and beauty of wildness, including the wildness that courses through us as human beings.
While we honor the universe, we need to maintain a healthy irreverence toward ourselves.  We need to challenge, to question, in some cases to mock, to look harder at our works, postures, and sayings. Grist has attracted readers who might be put off by the sense of frenzy and righteousness that can creep into environmental writing (including my own). So that’s where irreverence comes in.
Q. What do you make of the so-called “moderate” Congressional Democrats, ones like Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh, your representative, Baron Hill, and others who have suggested they may force Obama to slow down or water down renewable energy measures and capping carbon emissions? What do you think of the whole “moderate” or “centrist” terminology?
A. They’re not moderate, nor centrist, nor conservative. Insofar as they are endorsing the status quo, which is ruining the planet, they are extremists.  They refuse to recognize how radically our society needs to change. They seem to feel that we can cope with global-scale damage by making little changes around the edges of our lives. They’re not moderate; they’re timid. We need more courage and vision from all of our leaders, at the local, state, and national levels, and we need those qualities from Republicans as well as Democrats.
The word “conservative” ought to have some connection to the word “conserve.”  If you’re going to call yourself conservative, you ought to be clear about what it is you want to conserve.  Many conservatives, if they’re honest, will say, “I want to conserve as much money as possible in private hands, and I want to protect every opportunity to increase that private wealth, regardless of the cost to society or planet.” If we keep treating the accumulation of money by individuals and corporations as the highest good, we will continue to degrade Earth’s living systems, and we will leave a sadly diminished world for future generations. That’s as immoral a path as I can imagine.
Q. Thanks. What have I missed?
A. Some people come across A Conservationist Manifesto and say, “That title seems confrontational.” Maybe it is, I reply, but so is every billboard, every TV advertisement, every speech calling for endless growth, every Hummer on the highway, every assault on the Endangered Species Act, every call for drilling in wildlife refuges. If we plead, “Don’t forget that we share the planet with millions of other species, that we are degrading the living conditions for all beings including ourselves, that we are betraying future generations”—if we say all of that mildly and meekly, we have no chance of being heard in our cultural cacophony. We need to be forceful in challenging the ruinous path we’re on and the media and ideology that keep pushing us along that path. I hope that A Conservationist Manifesto is written in a measured, thoughtful, lucid way. But I also hope the book conveys a sense of ethical and practical urgency. Right now, anything less than urgency is inadequate to our situation.

AdelineShenUID: 2630498

Comment:

I feel lucky to come across this beautiful essay with fluently flowing language and a brimming heart of the beauty of science and nature, especially when I seach the author Scott Russel with Google and bump into a seemingly connection between the author and myself. He is a professor of the Indiana University and he has just finished a book named A Conservationist Manifesto focusing on environmental protection.Indiana university ranks first in the research on public policy of environmental management in America. There are beautiful forests and shining sunlight, which share the beauty of the nature to the most. If I have the chance to go to Indiana(although my dream unviversity is not there), I hope to meet Professor Russel and share with him my understanding of the beauty of science and nature. I'm looking forward the coming of that lovely special day.

Reading about the beauty of law and the power of nature in Russel's eyes, a strong feeling of emotion flushed into my minds. I love this expression of "close the circuit of creation." God created the beauty of nature. The beautiful nature nurtures human. And human beings embrace nature with their born sense of appreciation. The universe is incomprehensible because of the unlimitation of beauty. Beauty is a mysterious thing, which arouses our emotion and creation, which incentives us to search deeper into the heart of the earth, which makes us recoganize how weak we are when facing the power of nature and how strong we are when trying to disvocer the law. That is a way of paradox the beauty of nature want to cast upon us.

I am always eagering to appreciate the beauty in this somewhat impetuous world nowadays, when money and status is placed first in most people's lives, when the beauty of environment is damaged by economic growth, when the beauty of love is replaced by jelousy, when the beauty of trust is substituted by misconception.

Beautiful sunlight penetrates into my room while I am typing this illogical, maybe a little bit emotional comment. A new year is coming and I hope everyone in the earth can try to sense the beauty of nature and love. In most cases you do not need to be trained to sense the beauty. All you should do is to close your eyes, listen to your heart and breath the clean air mixed with the  fragrance of sunlight. You will soon feel that the beauty of the planet is walking toward you.~

adammaksimUID: 2675466

:victory: 回踩
向认真的Adeline 学习~~~

tracywlzUID: 2522388

:loveliness:ade
2010新年快乐~

海王泪UID: 2673613

ADE姐～～Happy New Year!!!
I love “Beauty” too.... :loveliness:

Life is just like a a field of honour where reason wages war against our emotion.
However, without emotion we have no power to do anything.
Hope what we will do can hold the beaty of nature!

P.S. If my memory serves, is your major Environment Engineering? Hehe~

plukaUID: 2721764

beautiful comment! happy new year!

StefanaUID: 2143510

嗯，我回来了。
冒泡给adeline加个油。
高亮过期了哇，努力这么久，这回给你粉色高亮。

AdelineShenUID: 2630498

Beyond Righteousness and Gain

by Zhou Guoping

"A virtuous man is concerned with righteousness while a mean man, with gain,” Confucius says. The "righteousness" and "gain" have long been a central theme in the Chinese philosophy of life. But, what if I am neither virtuous nor mean?

There was once a time when almost everyone claimed to be a gentleman and every word uttered was about righteousness. At that time, there might have been some truly virtuous men who were so righteous as to give up whatever was profitable. But, more likely, one might meet hypocrites who used righteousness as a fig leaf for their cupidity, or pedants believed in whatever passed for righteousness. Gone are the old days. The social trend has taken on a dramatic change unawares: the reputation of righteousness nosedived, truly virtuous men became extinct, hypocrites dropped the fig leaf and the scales fell from the eyes of the pedants. With- out exception, they all joined in the scramble for gains. It is believed that the philosophy of life has changed and a new interpretation of righteousness and gain looms large: seeking material gains is not the exclusive patent of the mean, but a golden rule for all.

"Time is money" is a vogue word nowadays. Nothing is wrong when entrepreneurs apply it to boost productivity. But, when it is worshipped as a motto of life and commercialism takes the place of other wisdom of life, life is then turned into a corporation and, consequently, interpersonal relations into a market.

I used to mock at the cheap "human touch". But, nowadays even the cheap “touch” has become rare and costly. Can you, if I may ask, get a smile, a greeting, or a tiny bit of compassion for free?

Don’t be nostalgic, though. It is in fact of little help if you try to redeem the world or salvage the corrupt minds through preaching various brands of righteousness. Nevertheless, beyond righteousness and gain, I believe, there are other attitudes towards life; beyond virtue and meanness, there are other individualities. Allow me to coin a sentence in the Confucian style: "A perfect man is concerned with disposition."

Indeed, righteousness and gain, seemingly poles apart, have much essence in common. Righteousness calls for a devotion to the whole society while gain drives one to pursue material interests. In both cases, one’s disposition is over- looked and his true “self” concealed. "Righteousness" teaches one to give while "gain" induces one to take. The former turns one’s life into a process of fulfilling endless obligations while the latter breeds a life-long scramble for wealth and power. We must remember, however, the true value of life is beyond obligations and power. Both righteousness and gain are yoked by calculating minds. That’s why we often find ourselves in a tense interpersonal relationship whether Mr. Righteousness is commanding or Mr. Gain, controlling.

If "righteousness" stands for an ethical philosophy of life, and "gain," a utilitarian one, what I mean by "disposition" is an aesthetical philosophy of fife, which advocates taking your disposition as the operational guidance for your fife, whereby everyone is allowed to keep his true "self". You do not five for the doctrines you believe in or the materials you possess. Instead, your true "self" makes you who you are. The true meaning of life lies not in giving or possessing, but in creating, which actively unfolds your true disposition, or, in other words, the emotional gratification you obtain through the exertion of your essential power. Different from giving, which is the performance of an external responsibility, creating is the realization of one’s true self. The difference between creating and possessing is more than crystal clear. Let’s take creative writing as an example: "Possessing" focuses on the fame or social status a piece of writing may bring, while "creating" highlights the plea- sure in the process of writing. A man of disposition seeks nothing but the communication of feelings while in company, and the cultivation of taste while possessing something. More valuably, in a time when most people are busy hunting for wealth and being hunted by it, a man of disposition is al- ways at ease in social intercourses. Here I' m not talking about the leisure of traditional Chinese scholar-officials, nor the complacency of conservative peasants, but about a peaceful mind coming from a non-materialistic attitude towards life. Using the writing example again, I’ve been wondering why a writer needs to be prolific. If he dreams of being enshrined, an immortal short poem is enough. Otherwise, he could be pretty much satisfied with a carefree life. In this sense, writing is merely a way for such a life.

Bernard Shaw once said, “There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart’s desire. The other is to get it." With it I couldn’t agree more. I did admire him for his easy and humorous way in describing the quandary of life. However, a deep ponder over it has brought home to me that Shaw’s standpoint is no other than "possessing", which keeps us stranded in a double dosage tragedy of life: it' s a pain not to possess your heart' s desire, and a tedium, to have possessed it. However, if we shift the standpoint from "possessing" to "creating", and look at life with an esthetic eye, we can interpret Shaw’s words the other way round: there are two comedies in life. One is not to get your heart’s desire, so you still have the opportunity to seek or create it. The other is to get your heart’s desire, and then you are able to enjoy tasting or experiencing it--Of course, life can never be free from pains, and a wealth hunter can not dream of the sadness of a man who places a premium on his true disposition. However, to be free from the mania for pos- session may at least save you many petty worries and pains, and let you enjoy a graceful life. 1 have no intention to prescribe the esthetic viewpoint as the cure for a corrupt world. I just want to express a belief: there is a life more worth living than the one haunted by righteousness and gain. And, this belief will help me sail through the unpredictable waters of my future life.

AdelineShenUID: 2630498

I was so excited while reading this essay that I nearly do not know from which point  to express my feelings. I like the essays of Zhouguoping in Chinese. They are always simple but deep in thought, which can penetrate into your heart, help you calm down when you are drawn crazy and  lead you to the  world of serenity when you are meeting with terrible storm. That's what the essays of Zhouguoping gives me, and this one is not an exception.

We are always told to become a righteousness person, who place the society's interest to the highest and always remember to give rather than take. But in this world where money can decide status and lead to luxury life, many people give up the priciple of righteousnesss and seek for self-interest to the most. Shall we choose to be righteous or self-interest? The philosophy of ancient China will give you the answer:NEITHER! The philosophy of Confucians focuses on the heart of humanity.Confucianism believes that human nature is virtuous and all we should do is to try to walk toward our inner heart and behave naturally in our true way. I am now still learning about the soul of the philosophy of ancient China, which help me keep peaceful in mind and try to be generous.

The day before yesterday a good friend of mine sent me a postcard of Barcelona, which he bought when he was travelling around Europe last year. On the back of the postcard he wrote a sentence for me:Let it go and you'll feel relief. I admit that I always feel strained as the competition is so fierce around me and everybody is walking here and there in a hurry. In some cases I hesitate to listen to my heart in fear of the unknown future. However, this friend of mine is a perfect example for me to become more relaxed and seek for what my heart truly wants bravely. He always listen to his heart and he is never halted by the outsiders. His inner heart contains a strong belief, which can help him sail through the unpredictable, but obviously, splendid waters of his future life.

"A perfect man is concerned with disposition." Always remember to listen to the eachoes of your innter heart, that's where your boat of life ought to sail toward. Never hesitate about this!

Here is a poem I like very much. Enjoy it~

God, grant me:
The serenity to accept the things that I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference!~

AdelineShenUID: 2630498

Comments：
I cannot catch the true meaning of this article until the end when the author puts  
the conclusion:You must avoid wickedness and pursue the good. Lift up your  
mind in virtue and hope and, in humility, offer your prayers to the Lord. This is  
the consolation of philosophy.What the article wants to explain is that the divine  
knowledge is eternal and continuous and God knows everything from the past  
to the present to the future. Even when you change your ideas, divine  
prescience runs ahead of everything and recollects it to the eternal present of  
its own knowledge. What's more, things are universal and considered in  
themselves they are free from the compulsion of necessity. In this case, God's  
rewards and punishments are meted out fairly and our hopes and prayers are  
not at all in vain.

I once had a talk with an American girl who believes in Christianism. She is  
pious and never forget to spread the spirit of God. She has a Bible in both  
Chinese and English translations which is sorted out all by herself. She carefully  
explained the spirit of God to me with this book. She believes that human  
beings have original sins and it's Jesus who saved all the human beings. God  
is the highest and the only bridge to connect with the God is to do good and  
pray. God never compels you to do anything. But as you have original sin, you  
should do good to atone for your sin. God can see your behavior from the  
highest and your pray will not be in vain. God can hear your hope.

I always respect the Christians. Whenever I meet with a Christian who is  
spreading the spirit of God, I carefully listen to him or her. From their pious eyes I  
can see their strong belief. This strong belief pushes them to do good to get  
connection with the God. This strong belief makes them full of hopes toward  
life. This strong belief encourages them to face the difficulties in life. In this  
case, I always feel that Christianism is more than a religion. It gives its disciples  
the strongest belief, the strongest encouragement to overcome the difficulty and  
the strongest devotion to help the poor. In that way, God is creating a better and  
better world!~


错字：
continuous
compel
atone for your sin
disciple
encouragement