Three passions,simle but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life:the longing for love,the search for knowledge and unbearable pity for the suffering mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a deep ocean of anguish, reaching to very verge of despair. 
   I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy-ecstasy so great that i would often have sactificed all the rest of my life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness-that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciiusness looks over th rim of world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it, finalliy, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets imagined. This is what I sought, and though if might seem too good for human life, this is what-at last-I have found. 
    With equel 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 above the flux. A little, but not much, I have achieved. 
    Love an kowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of painreverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressers, helpless old peaple a hated burden to their son, and the whole world of loneliness, 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. 
    This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.