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, 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