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.
Question)
1. What have you live for ?
2. What are you going to live for?
