这是罗素为其自传所写的序言，篇幅虽短，但因包含巨大的情感容量，因此历来被人们所传诵。
“我为何而生？”这是一个难参的人生之题，但是任何人都无法回避。罗素的回答是：爱、知识和怜悯，这三者囊括了西方文化的精髓。纵观罗素的一生，可以说痛苦与欢欣并存，不过自始至终，痛苦也是他生活的动力，在心底里，他还是像雪莱的诗里写的那样：“爱波涛暴风狂和狂澜，——几乎任何事物”，深沉的爱和痛苦汇成一股崇高的悲悯的力量，指引他去追求人类更为理想的生活。
对爱情的渴望，对知识的追求，对人类苦难不可遏制的同情，是支配我一生的单纯而强烈的三种感情。这些感情如阵阵巨风，吹拂在我动荡不定的生涯中，有时甚至吹过深沉痛苦的海洋，直抵绝望的边缘。
我所以追求爱情，有三方面的原因。首先，爱情有时给我带来狂喜，这种狂喜竟如此有力，以致使我常常会为了体验几小时爱的喜悦，而宁愿牺牲生命中其他一切。其次，爱情可以摆脱孤寂——身历那种可怕孤寂的人的战栗意识，有时会由世界的边缘，观察到冷酷无生命的无底深渊。最后，在爱的结合中，我看到了古今圣贤以及诗人们所梦想的天堂的缩影，这正是我所追寻的人生境界。虽然它对一般的人类生活也许太美好了，但这正是我透过爱情所得到场最终发现。
我曾以同样的感情追求知识，我渴望去了解人类的。也渴望知道星星为什么会发光，同时我还想理解毕达哥拉斯的力量。
爱情与知识的可能领域，总是引领我到天堂的境界，可对人类苦难的同情经常把我带回现实世界。那些痛苦的呼唤经常在我内心深处引起回响。饥饿中的孩子，被压迫被折磨者，给子女造成重担的孤苦无依的老人，以及全球性的孤独、贫穷和痛苦的存在，是对人类生活理想的无视和讽刺。我常常希望能尽自己的微薄之力去减轻这不必要的痛苦，但我发现我完全失败了，因此我自己也感到很痛苦。
这就是我的一生，我发现人是值得活的。如果有谁再给我一次生活的机会，我将欣然接受这难得的赐予。
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.
