三种热情，简单却难以抵挡，他们控制着我生活的全部：向往爱情，渴望知识，同情人类所遭受的灾难。这股热情，像一阵巨大的风，将我吹到这里吹到那里，在这不规则的路线中，穿过痛苦的海洋，到达绝望彼岸。

what 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（任性的，不定的） course, over a great ocean of anguish（苦闷，痛苦）, 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. children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a 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 this 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.