exercises

It was great! I got a promotion! I’ll have more responsibilities in the office, but the best

news is that I’ll have more money at the end of each month.

Unfortunately, I have to go to a conference this weekend so I won’t be able to go to

dinner with your parents this Friday. Sorry to let you down.

You’re sorry? You’re sorry?!?! I’m afraid “sorry” isn’t good enough. I’ve already

told them you’re going, Ben!

I know, I know. And I am sorry about it. But as long as you have the chance to see them

it’s okay, right?

Fine. But we’re going to dinner with them next Friday. No excuses.

Fine. But we’re going to dinner with them next Friday. No excuses.

A Good Sandwich

Gordon was hungry. He opened the refrigerator. There must be something in here to eat, he thought. There was—a single hot dog.

He took it out of its package and put a small frying pan onto the stove's gas burner. He turned on the heat. Then he poured a little bit of vegetable oil into the pan. He sliced the hot dog in half lengthwise. When the oil got hot, he put the two halves in the pan. About a minute later, he flipped each half over. After another minute, he took the hot dog out of the pan.

Gordon put two slices of bread into the toaster. This was tasty and healthy bread. The first ingredient listed was organic sprouted wheat. The first ingredient in ordinary bread is usually unbleached flour.

When the toast popped up, he put mustard, mayonnaise, and ketchup on one slice. Then he added two slices of onion. On top of the onions, he placed the hot dog. On top of the hot dog, he put a couple of slices of apple. Then he added some bits of hot green chile, and then put the top piece of toast onto the chile bits.

Ahh, what a sandwich, he thought, as he sat down to eat.

What I have Lived For

Three passions,simple but overwhelming strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge,and

unbearrable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a deep 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 least 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 against the flux. At little of this, but not much, have I 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 as hated 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 the 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 offred to me.

from The Autobiography

of Bertrand Russell