What I Have Lived For (Bertrand Arthur william Russell)

                                                                 
                                                                   What I Have Lived For   (Bertrand Arthur william Russell)   
   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 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 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  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.                                                                   Prologue: What I Have Lived For  The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell （1967）                                                                                                                                                                        摘自《罗素自传》第一卷·序

    I have lived in the pursuit of a vision, both personal and social. Personal: to care for what is noble, for what is beautiful, for what is gentle; to allow moments of insight to give wisdom at more mundane times. Social: to see in imagination the society that is to be created, where individuals grow freely, and where hate and greed and envy die because there is nothing to nourish them. These things I believe, and the world, for all its horrors, has left me unshaken.

                                                                                                                                Postscript  
                                                                                                                                                                           摘自《罗素自传》后记