The ideals which have lighted me on my way and time after time given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. In this sense I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves-such an ethical basis I call more proper for a herd of swine. And yet everybody has certain ideals which determine the direction of his endeavours and his judgments. To inquire after the meaning or object of one's own existence or of creation generally has always seemed to me absurd from an objective point of view.
This feeling mercifully mitigates the sense of responsibility which so easily becomes paralysing, and it prevents us from taking ourselves and other people too seriously it conduces to a view of life in which humour, above all, has its due place. Schopenhauer's saying, that "a man can do as he will, but not will as he will," has been an inspiration to me since my youth up, and a continual consolation and unfailing well-spring of patience in the face of the hardships of life, my own and others'.
Everybody acts not only under external compulsion but also in accordance with inner necessity. In human freedom in the philosophical sense I am definitely a disbeliever. I also consider that plain living is good for everybody, physically and mentally. I regard class differences as contrary to justice and, in the last resort, based on force. I am strongly drawn to the simple life and am often oppressed by the feeling that I am engrossing an unnecessary amount of the labour of my fellow-men.
A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life depend on the labours 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. But from the point of view of daily life, without going deeper, we exist for our fellow-men-in the first place for those on whose smiles and welfare all our happiness depends, and next for all those unknown to us personally with whose destinies we are bound up by the tie of sympathy. The World As I See It What an extraordinary situation is that of us mortals! Each of us is here for a brief sojourn for what purpose he knows not, though he sometimes thinks he feels it. Is there any sense then, you ask, in putting it? I answer, the man who regards his own life and that of his fellow-creatures as meaningless is not merely unfortunate but almost disqualified for life. The Meaning of Life What is the meaning of human life, or of organic life altogether? To answer this question at all implies a religion.
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