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 likegreat winds have blown me hither and thither in a wayward course over a deep 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 finallybecause 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. I long to alleviate the 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 to me.