What I Have Lived For --Bertrand Russell

     上个学期买了一本中英对照的“罗素智慧快乐书”，其中的内容选自《征服幸福》，《婚姻与道德》（获诺贝尔文学奖）、《教育和社会秩序》、《我的信仰》。书中选的文章正如书名一样充满了智慧，读过后应为想明白了一些问题所以就会更加快乐。第一篇文章What I Have Lived For我读了几十遍仍很想再读，从网上找来贴在这里：   （下文摘自https://ahi791103.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!C5EF1360820FA814!666.entry）

What I Have Lived For

       Bertrand 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 my life for a few hours for 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…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.