"The root cause of trouble in the modern world is that the stupid are confident, while the intelligent are full of doubt." - "Too little freedom brings stagnation, too much chaos."
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The longing for love, the search for knowledge and the unbearable pity for the suffering of humanity. These passions, like a strong wind, drove me to and fro, on a restless course, across a great ocean of anxiety, reaching to the very brink of despair.
First, I sought love because it brings ecstasy - an ecstasy so great that I would often sacrifice the rest of my life for a few hours of this pleasure. I sought it because it alleviates loneliness - that terrible loneliness in which one trembling consciousness looks over the edge of the world into a cold unfathomable soulless abyss. I sought it also because in the union of love I saw, in mystical miniature, a prefigurement of the heaven imagined by saints and poets. This is what I was looking for, and though it may seem too good for human life, this is what I have - at last - found.
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