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.