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hree
passsions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, are governing my life: the
longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the
suffering of mankind.These three 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.
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 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 vison of the
heaven that saints and poets have imagined.
ith
equal passion I have sought knowledge.I wish to understand the
hearts of men.I wish to know why the stars shine.And I am trying to understand
how our universe was originated so that I can read the language of nature and
disprove the existence of god. Some of this, may be not all,
I must
achieve.
ove
and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the
heavens.But always pity bringing me back to the 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
lonliness, 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.
