Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love,
thesearch 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 great 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 life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because
itrelieves 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
pity 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 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 this 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.