伯特兰·罗素的人生哲学-优快云博客

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 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 if, 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 hated 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 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.

读书的时候，有时会看到自己的影子

大概那就是与作者的神交吧

换句话说，作者引起了读者的共鸣……

从一段文字了解一位作者，再更深入的了解这位作者

了解他的人生，再到了解他的思想

我们会获得许多启示

思想导师，我们都有这样一位导师，尽管、或许我们不曾深刻的意识到

每读这段文字，都会有一种莫名的激动

并且，得到一股力量