Love: Bertrand Russell

The Prologue to Bertrand Russell's Autobiography

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 course, over a great 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 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.

Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) won the Nobel prize for literature for his History of Western Philosophy and was the co-author of Principia Mathematica. He was an outspoken supporter of women's suffrage, human-rights, and was an agnostic and free-thinker.

More information: http://www.users.drew.edu/~jlenz/brs-about-br.html

Music by Australian Composer Nigel Westlake

My boy Tim took the photos

Category:

People & Blogs

Tags:

• Bertrand
• Russell
• Love
• atheist
• atheism
• agnostic

[MrDiscernment]

This is exquisite! Thank-you so much for posting this beautiful piece.

[AuntieDiluvian]

@MrDiscernment Thank you :)

[Shadowfoot1981]

What's the song called?

[AuntieDiluvian]

@Shadowfoot1981 It's the theme from an Australian movie called 'Stepfather of the Bride'

[mindonoverdrive]

This is a beautiful Russell piece. Your Tim did an excellent job with the photos and you have added more of my Bertrand Russell admiration. Thank you.

[leesoarez]

"If you feel lonely when you are alone, you are in bad company" ~ J.P. SARTRE

When it comes to LOVE and SOLiTUDE, Russel is just another ASS!

C'mon people! He's great, but he ain't perfect. Stop bowing yo heads to ALL he said without questioning and/or bringing your own life experience into it ..provided you have any life experience worth mentioning of course.

[DrNSalmon]

An exquisite video valentine, with the words of the greatest thinker of his time, and beyond it.

[BL0WY0URMIND]

@AuntieDiluvian russell was an atheist, not an diagnostics.

[kaxitaksi]

Beautiful :))

[notaboob27]

Awesome thank you

[MrUnscientific]

Now that was a lovely :-P

[niriop]

Russell didn't live in the 20th century--Russell *was* the 20th century.