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How to Win Friends and Influence People is the title of possibly the most famous book of the twentieth century.
《人性的弱点》可能是二十世纪最著名的一本书。
It is also one of the books most routinely ridiculed by people who think they are clever.
也是那些自认为聪明的人最常嘲笑的书之一。
Why on earth would an intelligent person need help with something as basic as that, intellectuals have mocked down the decades.
知识分子几十年来一直嘲讽，聪明人怎么会在这么基本的事情上需要帮助？
And in any case, good people don't need to 'win' friends; they already have them.
无论怎么说，好人不需要“赢得”朋友，因为他们本来就有朋友。
And they don't need to 'influence' them, they just need to say important things.
他们也不需要“影响”朋友，只要说一些重要的话就好了。
But these were not the assumptions of a man far cleverer and more important than intellectual history has ever been prepared to allow.
但那个在思想史上留下了智慧且重要的思想的人不是这样想的。
Born in 1888 into a poor farming family in rural Missouri, Dale Carnegie left school in his teens and rather than attend university he spent years selling bacon and soap to people living on isolated ranches.
戴尔·卡内基于1888年出生于密苏里州农村一个贫穷的农民家庭，十几岁时就离开了学校，他没有继续上大学，几年的时间里一直向生活在偏远牧场上的人出售培根和肥皂。
He then got involved in adult education and spent tens of thousands of evenings giving talks to small audiences in out-of-the-way towns.
之后，他接受了成人教育，数万个晚上都在偏僻的小镇上给小观众们做演讲。
With over-prominent ears and a prosaic hair-cut Dale Carnegie was almost the anti-type of what we imagine a great and centrally important writer might be like.
戴尔·卡内基的耳朵过于特别，发型平淡无奇，几乎我们想象中伟大而重要的作家完全相反。
In 1936, when he was in his late forties, he summed up his views on being nice in a book that was ridiculed by intellectuals then and now: How to Win Friends and Influence People.
1936年，卡耐基快要40岁的时候，在一本当时和现在都被知识分子嘲笑的一本书，《人性的弱点》中总结了他对“与人为善”的看法。
The issues that Carnegie addresses are utterly basic: we spend vast parts of our lives trying to build relationships, hoping to get others to appreciate who we are, to understand us and grasp what we have to offer them; and yet our efforts are, so often, far from successful.
戴尔·卡内基谈到的问题是非常基本的：我们一生中的大部分时间都在试图构建关系，希望别人欣赏我们，理解我们，把握我们需要提供给他们的东西；然而，我们的努力往往收效甚微。
Carnegie pinpointed things we desperately need to know and get good at but which had been largely neglected by previous writers.
卡内基确切地指出了我们需要迅速了解和领悟的东西，而此前并没有作家说明过这些内容。
What Carnegie suggests sounds entirely like common sense: smile, remember someone's name, listen to them, think about what they want, don't make your success come at the price of theirs; don't tell others they are wrong, get to understand (and appreciate) why they think as they do - especially if it strikes you as misguided.
卡内基提出的建议听起来完全就是常识：微笑，记住别人的名字，倾听他们的声音，思考他们想要什么，不要以他人的成功为代价去获得成功；不要告诉别人他们错了，要理解（并欣赏）为什么他们会这样想——特别是当你觉得他们被骗的时候。
And yet, these are precisely the things we generally forget to do.
然而，这些正是我们通常忽略的事情。
Carnegie recognized, with astonishing clarity, how naive-sounding the advice we need often really is.
卡内基以非常清晰的思维认识到，我们真正需要的建议是多么单纯。
Our culture wants us to imagine that what we need to know are very complicated things: a university will make sure its science students understand the Theory of Relativity or that its humanities graduates are acquainted with Foucault's views on 19th century prisons.
我们的文化希望我们明白自己需要掌握非常复杂的知识：一所大学会教理科学生理解相对论，或者教人文学科的毕业生理解福柯对于19世纪监狱的观点。
We're quite good at abstruse things.
我们对高深的东西很在行。
And yet we trip up on issues that are diametrically opposite in character: that are simple, emotional, and interpersonal.
然而，我们被性格方面完全相反的问题难倒了：这些问题十分简单、事关情绪和人际关系。
They involve not demonstrating how much we know, but rather showing how much we like other people.
我们不需要展示自己掌握多少知识，而要展示我们有多喜欢别人。
Knowledge of the truth is a tiny fraction of what it takes to make the truth effective in the world.
在生活中实践真理的过程中，了解真理只是其中很小的一部分。
What we need in spades is charm and an ability to persuade others that we are on their side.
坦率地说，我们需要的是魅力，和让他人明白我们和他们在一起的能力。
It is never enough to feel haughtily superior or, as unfortunately, pessimistically inferior - and simply wait for others to come to us.
傲慢地觉得自己高人一等，或是悲观而自卑，只等别人靠近我们，是远远不够的。
We have to master the art of winning people over to our side.
我们必须掌握赢得他人支持的艺术。
And we will be persuaded to change our minds only by people that we like and who we feel love and understand us: that is, by people who have taken Dale Carnegie's vital lessons to heart.
只有我们喜欢的人、我们认为爱我们、理解我们的人才会说服我们改变主意：这些人就是把戴尔·卡内基提供的重要经验铭记在心的人。
