“Suffering is our capital, our natural resource. Not oil or gas – but suffering. It is the only thing we are able to produce consistently. I'm always looking for the answer: why doesn't our suffering convert into freedom? Is it truly all in vain? Chaadayev was right: Russia is a country without memory, it's a space of total amnesia, a virgin consciousness for criticism and reflection.”
Quotes from Nobel Lecture
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Svetlana Alexievich 8
Belarusian investigative journalist and non-fiction prose w… 1948Related quotes
“On our earth we can only love with suffering and through suffering.”
Source: The Dream of a Ridiculous Man (1877), III
Context: On our earth we can only love with suffering and through suffering. We cannot love otherwise, and we know of no other sort of love. I want suffering in order to love. I long, I thirst, this very instant, to kiss with tears the earth that I have left, and I don't want, I won't accept life on any other!
2016, Memorial Service for Fallen Dallas Police Officers (July 2016)
Attributed in Einstein: The Life and Times by Ronald W. Clark (1971), p. 737. The only source given in the end notes is "personal information". Einstein is said to have made this comment when a box of candy was being passed around after dinner, and he said that his doctor wouldn't let him eat it. The book also says that 'A friend asked him why it was the devil and not God who had imposed the penalty. "What's the difference?" he answered. "One has a plus in front, the other a minus."'.
Attributed in posthumous publications
John Bolton Admits All Of These Wars Are For Oil http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAgv6HaOHzM, interview on Fox News, October 22, 2011
“We are suffering. We have suffered, and we are not afraid to suffer in order to win our cause.”
The Plan of Delano (1965)
Context: We are suffering. We have suffered, and we are not afraid to suffer in order to win our cause. We have suffered unnumbered ills and crimes in the name of the Law of the Land. Our men, women, and children have suffered not only the basic brutality of stoop labor, and the most obvious injustices of the system; they have also suffered the desperation of knowing that the system caters to the greed of callous men and not to our needs. Now we will suffer for the purpose of ending the poverty, the misery, and the injustice, with the hope that our children will not be exploited as we have been. They have imposed hunger on us, and now we hunger for justice. We draw our strength from the very despair in which we have been forced to live. We shall endure.
“…we learn resignation not by our own suffering, but by the suffering of others.”
Source: The Summing Up (1938), p. 64
“Just as we suffer from excess in all things, so we suffer from excess in literature; thus we learn our lessons, not for life, but for the lecture room.”
Quemadmodum omnium rerum, sic litterarum quoque intemperantia laboramus: non vitae sed scholae discimus.
Alternate translation: Not for life, but for school do we learn. (translator unknown)
Alternate translation: We are taught for the schoolroom, not for life. (translator unknown).
Source: Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius), Letter CVI: On the corporeality of virtue, Line 12