Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing
for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.
These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course,
over a deep ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.
I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy---ecstasy so great that I would
often have sacrificed all the rest of my life for a few hours for this joy. I have sought
it, next, because it relieves loneliness---that terrible loneliness in which one shivering
consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss.
I have sought it, finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature,
the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I
sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what---at last---I have
found.
With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men.
I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean
power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have
achieved.
Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always
it brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in
famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a hated burden to their sons,
and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life
should be. I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.
This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the
chance were offered me.