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 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 lifefor 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
