Bertrand Russell: What I Have Lived For... - Philosophy - Zimbio

" Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed mylife: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearablepity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds,have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a deep oceanof anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.

I have soughtlove, first, because it brings ecstasy -- ecstasy so great that I wouldoften have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy.I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness -- that terribleloneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim ofthe world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it,finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mysticminiature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poetshave imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too goodfor human life, this is what -- at last -- I have found.

Withequal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand thehearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I havetried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds swayabove the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.

Loveand knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward theheavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries ofpain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured byoppressors, helpless old people a hated burden to their sons, and thewhole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of whathuman life should be. I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot, and Itoo suffer. This has been my life. I have found it worth living, andwould gladly live it again if the chance were offered me."

-BertrandRussell (Prologue to Russell's Autobiography, 3.25.1956, Image:Passport, 1919) "The 20th Century's most important liberal thinker, oneof two or three of its major philosophers, and a prophet for millions ofthe creative and rational life. He was born in 1872, at the height ofBritain's economic and political ascendancy, and died in 1970 whenBritain's empire had all but vanished and her power had been drained intwo victorious but debilitating world wars. At his death, however, hisvoice still carried moral authority, for he was one of the world's mostinfluential critics of nuclear weapons and the American war in Vietnam."-The Bertrand Russell Gallery