- 目錄
第1篇 勇于戰(zhàn)勝恐懼英文演講稿
conquering fear
honorable judges, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen:
it is a great honor and pleasure to be here on this beautiful saturday morning to share with you my sentiments about life and passion for the english language.
about a year and a half ago, i took part in my very first english speech contest. when i stood before the microphone with all eyes starring directly at me, i could hardly speak. i stood there, embarrassed and helpless, struggling in vain for the right thing to say. my fears had paralyzed me.
while my passion for english has never changed, i lost my courage to speak in public. when my professor again encouraged me to take part in this competition, i said “no.” i couldn’t endure yet another painful e_perience. he looked me straight in the eye and said something that pierced my heart. i will never forget his words. “look,” he said, “we all have our fears, and you have yours. you could twist your ankle in a basketball game, but then be afraid to ever play again. running away can never dispel your fears, but action will. a winner is not one who never fails,but one who never quits.”
i spent a whole day with his words twisting and turning in my mind. then i made the bravest and wisest decision of my life: i would face my fears – and take part in the competition!
as it turned out, my dear old professor was right. now, here i am, once again standing before a microphone. my heart is beating fast, and my mouth is dry, but most importantly, i have faced my fears -- and that makes all the difference!
that's all.
thank you.
第2篇 ted演講稿戰(zhàn)勝恐懼
ted演講稿戰(zhàn)勝恐懼
predictthefuture.butweca;america.aftermorethantwo;當(dāng)然,有時(shí)候,我們所擔(dān)心的最壞的事情的確發(fā)生了;thenovelistvladimirnabok;combinationoftwoverydiff;scientific.agoodreaderha;complicatethereader';dreame
predict the future. but we can't possibly prepare for all of the fears that our imaginations concoct. so how can we tell the difference between the fears worth listening to and all the others? i think the end of the story of the whaleship esse_ offers an illuminating, if tragic, e_ample. after much deliberation, the men finally made a decision. terrified of cannibals, they decided to forgo the closest islands and instead embarked on the longer and much more difficult route to south
america. after more than two months at sea, the men ran out of food as they knew they might, and they were still quite far from land. when the last of the survivors were finally picked up by two passing ships, less than half of the men were left alive, and some of them had resorted to their own form of cannibalism. herman melville, who used this story as research for 'moby dick,' wrote years later, and from dry land, quote, 'all the sufferings of these miserable men of the esse_ might in all human probability have been avoided had they, immediately after leaving the wreck, steered straight for tahiti. but,' as melville put it, 'they dreaded cannibals.' so the question is, why did these men dread cannibals so much more than the e_treme likelihood of starvation? why were they swayed by one story so much more than the other? looked at from this angle, theirs becomes a story about reading.
當(dāng)然,有時(shí)候,我們所擔(dān)心的最壞的事情的確發(fā)生了。這就是恐懼本身如此特別的一點(diǎn)。偶爾,我們的恐懼可以預(yù)測(cè)未來。但我們不可能為我們想象力編造出來的所有恐懼都作好準(zhǔn)備。那么,我們?nèi)绾伪鎰e出值得聽的恐懼和其余不值聽的呢?我認(rèn)為捕鯨船esse_號(hào)的故事結(jié)局提供了一個(gè)富有啟發(fā)性的例子,盡管是個(gè)悲劇結(jié)局。經(jīng)過再三斟酌后,這些人最終作出了一個(gè)決定。由于害怕食人族,他們決定放棄航行到最近的島嶼,而選擇了更長(zhǎng)、更艱難的去往南美洲的航線。在海上待了兩個(gè)多月后,他們的食物如先前預(yù)料地消耗殆盡,而他們離陸地依然很遠(yuǎn)。當(dāng)最后的幸存者最終被兩艘路過的船只救起來時(shí),只有不到一半的人還活著,而其中一些人也選擇了吃人肉的.做法。赫爾曼·梅爾維爾(herman melville)在多年之后寫《白鯨記》前,研究了這個(gè)故事,身處陸地,他引述道:“esse_號(hào)上的這些可憐的船員所遭受的苦難或許是可以完全避免的,倘若他們能夠在離開沉船后立刻向塔希提島(tahiti)航行。但是,”正如梅爾維爾所說,“他們害怕食人族?!彼詥栴}來了,為什么這些人對(duì)食人族的恐懼如此之深,甚至都超過了極有可能發(fā)生的饑餓威脅呢?為什么他們被一個(gè)故事影響的程度遠(yuǎn)勝于另一個(gè)故事呢?從這個(gè)角度來看,他們的故事變成了一個(gè)關(guān)于解讀的故事。
the novelist vladimir nabokov said that the best reader has a
combination of two very different temperaments, the artistic and the
scientific. a good reader has an artist's passion, a willingness to get caught up in the story, but just as importantly, the reader also needs the coolness of judgment of a scientist, which acts to temper and
complicate the reader's intuitive reactions to the story. as we've seen, the men of the esse_ had no trouble with the artistic part. they
dreamed up a variety of horrifying scenarios. the problem was that they listened to the wrong story. of all the narratives their fears wrote, they responded only to the most lurid, the most vivid, the one that was easiest for their imaginations to picture: cannibals. but perhaps if they'd been able to read their fears more like a scientist, with more coolness of judgment, they would have listened instead to the less
violent but the more likely tale, the story of starvation, and headed for tahiti, just as melville's sad commentary suggests. and maybe if we all tried to read our fears, we too would be less often swayed by the most salacious among them. maybe then we'd spend less time worrying about serial killers and plane crashes, and more time concerned with the subtler and slower disasters we face: the silent buildup of plaque in our arteries, the gradual changes in our climate. just as the most nuanced stories in literature are often the richest, so too might our subtlest fears be the truest. read in the right way, our fears are an amazing gift of the imagination, a kind of everyday clairvoyance, a way of glimpsing what might be the future when there's still time to
influence how that future will play out. properly read, our fears can offer us something as precious as our favorite works of literature: a little wisdom, a bit of insight and a version of that most elusive thing -- the truth.
小說家弗拉基米爾·納博科夫(vladimir nabokov)說最好的讀者能把兩種截然不同的性格結(jié)合起來,一個(gè)是藝術(shù)氣質(zhì),一個(gè)是科學(xué)精神。好的讀者有藝術(shù)家的熱情,愿意融入故事當(dāng)中,但是同樣重要的是,這些讀者還要有科學(xué)家的冷靜判斷,這能幫助他們穩(wěn)定情緒并分析其對(duì)故事的直覺反應(yīng)。我們可以看出來,esse_上的人在藝術(shù)部分一點(diǎn)問題都沒有。他們夢(mèng)想到一系列恐怖的場(chǎng)景。問題在于他們聽從了一個(gè)錯(cuò)誤的故事。所有他們恐懼中他們只對(duì)其中最聳人聽聞,最生動(dòng)的故事,也是他們想象中最早出現(xiàn)的場(chǎng)景:食人族。也許,如果他們能像科學(xué)家那樣稍微冷靜一點(diǎn)解讀這個(gè)故事,如果他們能聽從不太驚悚但是更可能發(fā)生的半路餓死的故事,他們可能就會(huì)直奔塔西提群島,如梅爾維爾充滿惋惜的評(píng)論所建議的那樣。 也許如果我們都試著解讀自己的恐懼,我們就能少被其中的一些幻象所迷惑。我們也就能少花一點(diǎn)時(shí)間在為系列殺手或者飛機(jī)失事方面的擔(dān)憂,而是更多的關(guān)
心那些悄然而至的災(zāi)難:動(dòng)脈血小板的逐漸堆積,氣候的逐漸變遷。如同文學(xué)中最精妙的故事通常是最豐富的故事,我們最細(xì)微的恐懼才是最真實(shí)的恐懼。用正確的方法的解讀,我們的恐懼就是我們想象力賜給我們的禮物,借此一雙慧眼,讓我們能管窺未來甚至影響未來。如果能得到正確的解讀,我們的恐懼能和我們最喜歡的文學(xué)作品一樣給我們珍貴的東西:一點(diǎn)點(diǎn)智慧,一點(diǎn)點(diǎn)洞悉以及對(duì)最玄妙東西——真相的詮釋。