《我为什么而活着》罗素如下：

《我为什么而活着》是《罗素自传》的序言，作者是伯特兰·罗素。本文是罗素的思想随笔，从中可以窥见思想家罗素的崇高思想境界和伟大人格。先后收录在江苏教育出版社高中语文必修5教科书 以及人民教育出版社新版八年级上册语文教科书中。

英文原文

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.