I Have Lived For(我为什么而活着)

I Have Lived For(我为什么而活着)

           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 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. 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 to me.

我为什么而活着

    三种朴素而强烈的感情控制了我的一生：对爱的渴望，对知识的追求以及对人类苦难的难以遏制的同情。这三种感情像飓风一样把我卷到痛苦的深渊，忽东忽西，捉摸不