中文原文

【中文原文】

西洋人究竟近乎白痴，什么事都只讲究脚踏实地去做，这样费力气的勾当，我们聪明的中国人，简直连牙齿都要笑掉了。西洋人什么事都讲究按部就班地慢慢动作来，从来没有平地登天的捷径，而我们中国人专走捷径，而走捷径的第一个法门，就是吹牛。

吹牛是一件不可看轻的艺术，就如修辞学上不可缺少“张喻”一类的东西一样。像李太白什么“黄河之水天上来”，又是什么“白发三千丈”，这在修辞学上就叫做“张喻”，而在不懂修辞学的人看来，就觉得李太白在吹牛了。

英文译文

【英文译文】

Because of their earnest and down-to-earth approach to work, westerners are, in the eyes of Chinese smarties, next door to idiotic, They are being laughed at by Chinese smarties for the tremendous amount of energy they put into their activities．While westerners go about whatever work they do methodically and patiently，never dreaming of reaching great heights in one step, we Chinese are always given to seeking a shortcut and regard the ability to boast as the master key to it.

Boasting is an essential art of life just as hyperbole is an indispensable rhetorical figure．The Tang poet Li Bai’s famous lines “The Yellow River comes from the sky” and “My white hair of thirty thousand feet”，examples of hyperbole，which, to those who know little about the art of rhetoric，may sound like a gross exaggeration of the part of the poet.