"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.
With the same passion I have sought knowledge
I wished to understand the hearts of men. I wished to know why the stars shine. And I sought to understand the Pythagorean power that makes number prevail over variable. I achieved some of that, but not much. Love and knowledge, as far as possible, led upwards to the heavens. But always regret brought me back to earth. Echoes of painful cries echo in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by their oppressors, helpless old people who are a burden to their sons, and a whole world of loneliness, poverty and pain mock what human life should be. I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot and I suffer.
This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if offered the opportunity.
Bertrand Russell
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