"How strange is the lot of us mortals! Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though he sometimes thinks he senses it.
But without deeper reflection one knows from daily life that one exists
for other people -- first of all for those upon whose smiles and
well-being our own happiness is wholly dependent,
and then for the many,known to us, to whose destinies we are bound
by the ties of sympathy. A hundred times every day I remind myself
that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other
men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to
give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving...
"I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in
themselves -- this critical basis I call the ideal of a
pigsty. The ideals that have lighted my way, and time
after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully,
have been Kindness, Beauty, and Truth. Without the sense of
kinship with men of like mind, without the occupation with the
objective world, the eternally unattainable in the field
of art and scientific endeavors,life would have seemed empty
to me. The trite objects of human efforts --possessions,
outward success, luxury -- have always seemed to me contemptible.
"My passionate sense of social justice and social
responsibility has always contrasted oddly with my
pronounced lack of need for direct contact with other human beings
and human communities. I am truly a 'lone traveler' and have
never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my
immediate family, with my whole heart; in the face of all
these ties, I have never lost a sense of distance and a
need for solitude..."
"My political ideal is democracy. Let every man be respected
as an individual and no man idolized. It is an irony of fate
that I myself have been the recipient of excessive admiration
and reverence from my fellow-beings, through no fault, and no
merit, of my own. The cause of this may well be the desire,
unattainable for many, to understand the few ideas to which I
have with my feeble powers attained through ceaseless struggle.
I am quite aware that for any organization to reach its goals,
one man must do the thinking and directing and generally bear
the responsibility. But the led must not be coerced, they must be
able to choose their leader. In my opinion, an autocratic
system of coercion soon degenerates; force attracts men of
low morality... The really valuable thing in the pageant of
human life seems to me not the political state, but the
creative, sentient individual, the personality; it alone creates
the noble and the sublime, while the herd as such remains dull
in thought and dull in feeling. "This topic brings me to that
worst outcrop of herd life, the military system, which I abhor...
This plague-spot of civilization ought to be abolished
with all possible speed. Heroism on command, senseless violence,
and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name
of patriotism -- how passionately I hate them!
"The most beautiful experience
we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that
stands at the cradle of true art and true science.
Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer
marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was
the experience of mystery -- even if mixed with fear -- that
engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of
something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest
reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most
primitive forms are accessible to our minds: it is this
knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity.
In this sense, and only this sense, I am a deeply religious
man... I am satisfied with the mystery of life's eternity
and with a knowledge, a sense, of the marvelous structure of
existence -- as well as the humble attempt to understand
even a tiny portion of the Reason that manifests itself in nature."
The End