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No one gets to be a human being unaided. There is not time enough in a single lifetime to invent for oneself everything one needs to know in order to be a civilized human.
没有前人的帮助，谁也不会成长为一个文明人。人生苦短，不足以自己创造成为一个文明人所需知道的一切知识。
Assume, for example, that you want to be a physicist. You pass the great stone halls of, say, M.I.T., and there cut into the stone are the names of the scientists. The chances are that few if any of you will leave your names to be cut into those stones.
比如说你想成为一个物理学家。穿过麻省理工学院的宏伟的石材大厅，你会发现那里的石墙上刻着很多科学家的名字。很可能将来，你们当中几乎没有人可以把名字留在那些石墙上，如果有的话也是极少数。
Yet any of you who managed to stay awake through part of a high school course in physics, knows more about physics than did many of those great scholars of the past. You know more because they left you what they knew, because you can start from what the past learned for you.
然而，你们中间任何一个人，只要在中学物理课上还有不打瞌睡的时候，那你的物理知识就会比过去很多伟大的学者都要多。那是因为他们将他们知道的传给了你，你可以从他们已了解的知识上起步。
And as this is true of the techniques of mankind, so it is true of mankind's spiritual resources. Most of these resources, both technical and spiritual, are stored in books. Books are man's peculiar accomplishment. When you have read a book, you have added to your human experience.
人类的技术发展是如此，人类精神财富的积累也是如此。这些技术和精神的大部分资料都存储在书中。书籍是人类独有的成就。你读完了一本书，你就丰富了你的人生经历。
Read Homer and your mind includes a piece of Homer's mind. Through books you can acquire at least fragments of the mind and experience of Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare—the list is endless. For a great book is necessarily a gift; it offers you a life you have not the time to live yourself, and it takes you into a world you have not the time to travel in literal time. A civilized mind is, in essence, one that contains many such lives and many such worlds.
阅读荷马的作品，你的头脑里就有了荷马的思想。通过读书你起码能获得一些弗吉尔、但丁、莎士比亚的思想和经历——这些名字是不胜枚举的。因为一本好书必然是一份礼物；它为你呈现你没时间去亲自体验的生活，带你进入一个你在现实生活中没时间去亲自游览的世界。从本质上说，一个文明人应该了解许多这样的生活和这样的世界。
If you are too much in a hurry, or too arrogantly proud of your own limitations, to accept as a gift to your humanity some pieces of the minds of Aristotle, or Chaucer or Einstein, you are neither a developed human nor a useful citizen of a democracy.
如果你太过匆忙，或是对自己的无知洋洋得意，因而没有接受亚里士多德、乔叟或爱因斯坦等人的某些思想作为你为人之道的礼物，那么你既不是一个心智发育完全的人，也不是一个民主社会的有用公民。
