A Confession

: I feared life, desired to escape from it, yet still hoped something of it.

the ar­biter of what is good and evil is not what people say and do, nor is it pro­gress, but it is my heart and I.

It is now clear to me that this was just as in a lun­atic asylum; but then I only dimly sus­pec­ted this, and like all lun­at­ics, simply called all men lun­at­ics ex­cept my­self.

There­fore I hated life; be­cause the work that is wrought un­der the sun is griev­ous unto me: for all is van­ity and vex­a­tion of spirit.

I was bap­tized and brought up in the Ortho­dox Chris­tian faith. I was taught it in child­hood and through­out my boy­hood and youth. But when I aban­doned the second course of the uni­ver­sity at the age of eight­een I no longer be­lieved any of the things I had been taught.

Judging by cer­tain memor­ies, I never ser­i­ously be­lieved them, but had merely re­lied on what I was taught and on what was pro­fessed by the grown-up people around me, and that re­li­ance was very un­stable.

He reaches a glade, climbs a tree, and clearly sees the lim­it­less dis­tance, but sees that his home is not and can­not be there; then he goes into the dark wood and sees the dark­ness, but there also his home is not.

All hu­man­ity lives and de­vel­ops on the basis of spir­itual prin­ciples and ideals which guide it. Those ideals are ex­pressed in re­li­gions, in sci­ences, in arts, in forms of gov­ern­ment. Those ideals be­come more and more el­ev­ated, and hu­man­ity ad­vances to its highest wel­fare. I am part of hu­man­ity, and there­fore my vo­ca­tion is to for­ward the re­cog­ni­tion and the real­iz­a­tion of the ideals of hu­man­ity.

Today or to­mor­row sick­ness and death will come (they had come already) to those I love or to me; noth­ing will re­main but stench and worms.

As long as I did not know why, I could do noth­ing and could not live.

Then these mo­ments of per­plex­ity began to re­cur of­tener and of­tener, and al­ways in the same form. They were al­ways ex­pressed by the ques­tions: What is it for? What does it lead to?