The Prologue to Bertrand Russell's Autobiography:
What I have lived for
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.
On
Denoting (1905)
Vagueness (1923)
Icarus
or The Future of Science (1924)
What is an Agnostic
Knowledge and
Wisdom
Why I am
not a Christian (06.03.1927)
In
Praise of Idleness (1932)
Of Co-Operation
(18.05.1932)
On Sales Resistance
(22.06.1932)
On Modern
Uncertainty (20.07.1932)
What is the Soul?
(28.09.1932)
On youthful
Cynism (1930)
Philosophical
Consequences of Relativity (1626)
On Astrologers
How
to become a Man of Genius
Education
and Disciple
What
Desires are politically important? (Speech at the Nobel Award, 11.12.1950)
Prolog to his Autobiography: What
I have lived for