120 philosophical essays you must read in your life

Chapter 116

Chapter 7 Section 2 Why I Was Born

[UK] Russell
The longing for love, the search for knowledge, and an irrepressible pity for the suffering of mankind, are three passions, simple but powerful, which have governed my life.These feelings have blown like winds through my uncertain life, sometimes even across deep oceans of anguish, right to the brink of despair.

There are three reasons why I pursue love:

First, love brought me ecstasy sometimes - ecstasy so powerful that I would often have sacrificed all of life for a few hours of the joy of love.

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.

At last, in the union of love, I have seen, in a miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that sages and poets have dreamed, and this is the all I have sought in life.Too good for human life in general as it may be, this is what I have finally found through love.

With equal affection I have sought knowledge. I have longed to know the mind of man, and why the stars shine, and I have wanted to understand the power of Pythagoras.The possible realms of love and knowledge have always led me to the realms of heaven, but sympathy for human suffering has often brought me back to the real world, and those calls of pain have often echoed in my heart.

The starving children, the oppressed and the tortured, the old who are a burden to their children, and the existence of loneliness, poverty, and suffering around the globe are a disregard and irony of the ideals of human life.

I have often wished I could do my little to alleviate this needless suffering, but I have found that I have failed utterly, and that I suffer accordingly.

This is my life, and I find that people are worth living.If someone gives me another chance to live, I will gladly accept this rare gift.

If there is such a state, the mind can find a solid foundation on which it can rest and gather all its strength without looking back and forth; time has no effect on it, and the present moment can last forever. No sense of lack or enjoyment, neither pain nor pleasure, neither desire nor fear, but only our own existence, this feeling is enough to enrich our soul.As long as this state lasts, a person in this state can call himself happy.It is not a wretched, incomplete, relative happiness that one derives from life, but a full, complete happiness that leaves no emptiness in the soul, which is in nature, in The realm where you are in reverie by the gurgling stream by the choppy lake.

【Together with you】

The meaning of life is sometimes the living itself.But life always needs a purpose. Without a purpose, people tend to despair, get lost, and give up easily.

Give yourself a reason to live, and your life will be much brighter because of it.

Life is actually living a feeling.You have the happiness of a rich man, and I have the happiness of a poor man.You enjoy the scenery in the golden house, but I can breathe the freshest air in nature.Everyone has their own life, and life does not need a frame of reference.A wise man said: The meaning of life is to carry forward life, and happiness is the best choice to carry forward life.

Happiness is sometimes hard to come by, once you encounter happiness, don't hesitate to grab it.

(End of this chapter)