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 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