Source: AIDS and Its Metaphors, (1989), ch. 4, p. 125, Farrar, Straus and Giroux ISBN 0-312-42013-7 ; later published in combination with Illness As Metaphor. This combined edition is the one referenced here.
“It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades.”
—
Susan Sontag
,
book
AIDS and Its Metaphors
AIDS and Its Metaphors, (1989), ch. 4, p. 125, Farrar, Straus and Giroux ISBN 0-312-42013-7
AIDS and Its Metaphors was later published in combination with Illness As Metaphor. This combined edition is the one referenced here.
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Susan Sontag 168
American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist 1933–2004Related quotes
Source: The Seven Storey Mountain (1948)
Context: Indeed, the truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt. The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers the most: and his suffering comes to him from things so little and so trivial that one can say that it is no longer objective at all. It is his own existence, his own being, that is at once the subject and the source of his pain, and his very existence and consciousness is his greatest torture.
Aung San Suu Kyi
(1945) State Counsellor of Myanmar and Leader of the National League for Democracy
Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech (2012)
Context: Are we not still guilty, if to a less violent degree, of recklessness, of improvidence with regard to our future and our humanity? War is not the only arena where peace is done to death. Wherever suffering is ignored, there will be the seeds of conflict, for suffering degrades and embitters and enrages.
“He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears.”
Michel De Montaigne
(1533–1592) (1533-1592) French-Occitan author, humanistic philosopher, statesman
Book III, Ch. 13
Attributed
Source: The Complete Essays
“Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself.”
Source: The Alchemist (1988), p. 130 <!-- also p. 156 -->
Context: Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second's encounter with God and with eternity.
