Three passions (激情) , simple but extremely 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 here and there in a wild course, over a deep ocean of sorrow, reaching to the very edge of despair. I have sought love, first, because it brings joy - joy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of my 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 edge of the world into the cold immeasurable lifeless hole. I have sought it, finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature (缩影) , the bright vision of the heaven
