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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.
沒有前人的幫助，誰也不會成長為一個文明人。人生苦短，不足以自己創造成為一個文明人所需知道的一切知識。
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.
比如說你想成為一個物理學家。穿過麻省理工學院的宏偉的石材大廳，你會發現那里的石墻上刻著很多科學家的名字。很可能將來，你們當中幾乎沒有人可以把名字留在那些石墻上，如果有的話也是極少數。
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，你們中間任何一個人，只要在中學物理課上還有不打瞌睡的時候，那你的物理知識就會比過去很多偉大的學者都要多。那是因為他們將他們知道的傳給了你，你可以從他們已了解的知識上起步。
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.
人類的技術發展是如此，人類精神財富的積累也是如此。這些技術和精神的大部分資料都存儲在書中。書籍是人類獨有的成就。你讀完了一本書，你就豐富了你的人生經歷。
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.
閱讀荷馬的作品，你的頭腦里就有了荷馬的思想。通過讀書你起碼能獲得一些弗吉爾、但丁、莎士比亞的思想和經歷——這些名字是不勝枚舉的。因為一本好書必然是一份禮物；它為你呈現你沒時間去親自體驗的生活，帶你進入一個你在現實生活中沒時間去親自游覽的世界。從本質上說，一個文明人應該了解許多這樣的生活和這樣的世界。
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.
如果你太過匆忙，或是對自己的無知洋洋得意，因而沒有接受亞里士多德、喬叟或愛因斯坦等人的某些思想作為你為人之道的禮物，那么你既不是一個心智發育完全的人，也不是一個民主社會的有用公民。
