Quotes about affliction (274 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“I set my mind to seek and explore by wisdom concerning all that has been done under heaven. It is a grievous task which God has given to the sons of men to be afflicted with.”

Solomon (-990–-931 BC) king of Israel and the son of David

Ecclesiastes, 1:13 http://bible.cc/ecclesiastes/1-13.htm, New American Standard Bible

Wisdom , Men , God

“In the midst of the affliction He counsels, strengthens confirms, nourishes, and favors us…. More over, when we have repented, He instantly remits the sins as well as the punishments. In the same manner parents ought to handle their children.”

Martin Luther (1483–1546) seminal figure in Protestant Reformation

Children , Parent

“I ask myself: is every story that has ever been written in this world, a story of suffering and affliction?”

Clarice Lispector book The Hour of the Star

Source: The Hour of the Star

World , Suffering

“Everybody says there is this world and the coming world. Behold, here is the coming world -- we believe that the coming world exists; perhaps this world also exists in some place, because here it looks like hell, for everybody is full of great afflictions all the time (and he said that this world does not exist at all). — Likutei Moharan II 119”

Nachman of Breslov (1772–1810) Ukrainian rabbi

Hakol omrim sh'yesh olam hazeh v'olam haba. V'hine, ba'olam habah anu ma'aminim sh'yeshno, efshar sh'yesh olam hazeh b'eize olam, ki kan nir'a sh'hu ha'geheinom, ki kulam m'le'im yisurim gedolim tamid, v'amar she'ein nimtza shum olam hazeh klal.
אין שום יאוש בעולם כלל
Attributed

World , Hell , Time

“The Gospel that we preach is the power of God unto salvation; and the first principle of that Gospel is, as I have already said, faith in God, and faith in Jesus Christ His Son our Savior. We must believe that he is the character he is represented to be in the holy Scriptures. Believe that he told the truth when he said to his disciples, "Go ye forth and preach the Gospel to every creature; he that believeth and is baptized shall be saved, but he that believeth not shall be damned." We must believe that this same Jesus was crucified for the sins of the world, that is for the original sin, not the actual individual transgressions of the people; not but that the blood of Christ will cleanse from all sin, all who are disposed to act their part by repentance, and faith in his name. But the original sin was atoned for by the death of Christ, although its effects we still see in the diseases, tempers and every species of wickedness with which the human family is afflicted.”

Brigham Young (1801–1877) Latter Day Saint movement leader

Journal of Discourses 13:143 (July 11, 1869)
1860s

Death , God , People , Truth

“Love, which is quickly kindled in the gentle heart,
seized this man for the fair form that was
taken from me, and the manner afflicts me still.
Love, which absolves no one beloved from loving,
seized me so strongly with his charm
that, as thou seest, it does not leave me yet.”

Dante Alighieri book Inferno

Canto V, lines 100–105 (tr. Sinclair).
The Divine Comedy (c. 1308–1321), Inferno

Love , Heart

“I myself am no longer very much afflicted by the thought of my own death. The synthesis, Peter Wessel Zapffe, did not originate until 1899. It was spared from immediate participation in the horrors of the previous years, and it will not miss what awaits mankind at the end of its vertiginous madness.”

Peter Wessel Zapffe (1899–1990) Norwegian philosopher, mountaineer, and author

Source: The Last Messiah (1933), To Be a Human Being https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4m6vvaY-Wo&t=1110s (1989–90)

Death , Madness

“A believer is as the two pans of a scale, that whenever his faith increases his afflictions increase.”

Musa al-Kadhim (745–799) Seventh of the Twelve Imams and regarded by Sunnis as a renowned scholar

Ibn Shu’ba al-Harrani, Tuhaf al-'Uqul, p. 432.
Religious Wisdom

Faith

“Glory follows afflictions, not as the day follows the night but as the spring follows the winter; for the winter prepares the earth for the spring, so do afflictions sanctified prepare the soul for glory.”

Richard Sibbes (1577–1635) English theologian

Soul , Spring , Winter , Night

“I have sought you out to cure me.'
'To cure you of what?'
'Of this cursed affliction.'
'I cannot cure stupidity.'
Scapegrace frowned.”

Derek Landy (1974) Irish children's writer

Source: Death Bringer

Stupidity

“To put it in a nutshell, he was afflicted with a love of literature. It was the fatal nature of this disease to substitute a phantom for reality.”

Virginia Woolf book Orlando: A Biography

Source: Orlando

Love , Disease , Literature , Nature

“In all life one should comfort the afflicted, but verily, also, one should afflict the comfortable, and especially when they are comfortably, contentedly, even happily wrong.”

John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) American economist and diplomat

The Guardian [UK] (28 July 1989)

Life

“true weanedness from the world don't consist in being beat off from the world by the affliction of it, but a being drawn off by the sight of something better.”

Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) Christian preacher, philosopher, and theologian

World

“Jesus tells us to keep our eyes open so we are not fooled by the signs indicating that the End Times are near. As we get closer to the End Times, many people are going to claim to be the Messiah and claim to have the answers for a troubled world. Additionally, the book of Revelation tells us to expect a period of ceaseless, unending, terrible war. It appears that we are already preparing for this time as fifty percent of all research scientists today are involved in arms development and there is at least one military weapon and four thousand pounds of explosives for every man, woman, and child on earth. Finally, there will be more and more disease and devastation. Today, as you read this, millions of people in the world are being afflicted by insufficient food, the spread of new diseases, and the devastating effects of natural disasters. As we get closer to the End Times, there will be more and more famine. There will also be an increase in earthquakes and natural disasters. Christ also spoke of pestilence: the spread of new diseases. Our world will experience a spate of tragic new diseases that we will be unable to control.”

David Jeremiah

Source: The Prophecy Answer Book

War , People , Books , World

“Let your heart feel for the afflictions and distress of everyone.”

George Washington (1732–1799) first President of the United States

Feeling , Heart

“Sunday neurosis, that kind of depression which afflicts people who become aware of the lack of content in their lives when the rush of the busy week is over and the void within themselves becomes manifest.”

Viktor E. Frankl book Man's Search for Meaning

Source: Man's Search for Meaning

People , Business

“Love is something far more than desire for sexual intercourse; it is the principal means of escape from the loneliness which afflicts most men and women throughout the greater part of their lives.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

1920s, Marriage and Morals (1929)

Love , Women , Men , Parting

“It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence, to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: "And this, too, shall pass away." How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! How consoling in the depths of affliction!”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

1850s, Address before the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society (1859)

Men , Time

“In my youth and comparative inexperience I had always regarded the yearning and pangs of love as the worst torture that could afflict the human heart. At this moment, however, I began to realize that there was another and perhaps grimmer torture than that of longing and desiring: that of being loved against one's will and of being unable to defend oneself against the urgency of another's passion; of seeing another human being seared by the flame of her desire and of having to look impotently, lacking the power, the capacity, the strength to pluck her from the flames. He who is himself crossed in love is able from time to time to master his passion, for he is not the creature but the creator of his own misery; and if a lover is unable to control his passim, he at least knows that he is himself to blame for his sufferings.”

Stefan Zweig book Beware of Pity

Beware of Pity (1939)

Love , Youth , Lovers , Suffering

“The most detestable wickedness, the most horrid cruelties, and the greatest miseries, that have afflicted the human race have had their origin in this thing called revelation, or revealed religion.”

Thomas Paine book The Age of Reason

Source: 1790s, The Age of Reason, Part II (1795), Chapter III: Conclusion.

Religion

“He who is himself crossed in love is able from time to time to master his passion, for he is not the creature but the creator of his own misery; and if a lover is unable to control his passion, he at least knows that he is himself to blame for his sufferings. But he who is loved without reciprocating that love is lost beyond redemption, for it is not in his power to set a limit to that other's passion, to keep it within bounds, and the strongest will is reduced to impotence in the face of another's desire. Perhaps only a man can realize to the full the tragedy of such an undesired relationships; for him alone the necessity to resist t is at once martyrdom and guilt. For when a woman resists an unwelcome passion, she is obeying to the full the law of her sex; the initial gesture of refusal is, so to speak, a primordial instinct in every female, and even if she rejects the most ardent passion she cannot be called inhuman. But how disastrous it is when fate upsets the balance, when a woman so far overcomes her natural modesty as to disclose her passion to a man, when, without the certainty of its being reciprocated, she offers her love, and he, the wooed, remains cold and on the defensive! An insoluble tangle this, always; for not to return a woman's love is to shatter her pride, to violate her modesty. The man who rejects a woman's advances is bound to wound her in her noblest feelings. In vain, then, all the tenderness with which he extricates himself, useless all his polite, evasive phrases, insulting all his offers of mere friendship, once she has revealed her weakness! His resistance inevitably becomes cruelty, and in rejecting a woman's love he takes a load of guild upon his conscience, guiltless though he may be. Abominable fetters that can never be cast off! Only a moment ago you felt free, you belonged to yourself and were in debt to no one, and now suddenly you find yourself pursued, hemmed in, prey and object of the unwelcome desires of another. Shaken to the depths of your soul, you know that day and night someone is waiting for you, thinking of you, longing and sighing for you - a woman, a stranger. She wants, she demands, she desires you with every fibre of her being, with her body, with her blood. She wants your hands, your hair, your lips, your manhood, your night and your day, your emotions, your senses, and all your thought and dreams. She wants to share everything with you, to take everything from you, and to draw it in with her breath. Henceforth, day and night, whether you are awake or asleep, there is somewhere in the world a being who is feverish and wakeful and who waits for you, and you are the centre of her waking and her dreaming. It is in vain that you try not to think of her, of her who thinks always of you, in vain that you seek to escape, for you no longer dwell in yourself, but in her. Of a sudden a stranger bears your image within her as though she were a moving mirror - no, not a mirror, for that merely drinks in your image when you offer yourself willingly to it, whereas she, the woman, this stranger who loves you, she has absorbed you into her very blood. She carries you always within her, carries you about with her, no mater whither you may flee. Always you are imprisoned, held prisoner, somewhere else, in some other person, no longer yourself, no longer free and lighthearted and guiltless, but always hunted, always under an obligation, always conscious of this "thinking-of-you" as if it were a steady devouring flame. Full of hate, full of fear, you have to endure this yearning on the part of another, who suffers on your account; and I now know that it is the most senseless, the most inescapable, affliction that can befall a man to be loved against his will - torment of torments, and a burden of guilt where there is no guilt.”

Stefan Zweig book Beware of Pity

Beware of Pity (1939)

Love , Hate , Friendship , Fate

“By Allah no one is our Shī‘ah except that he has piety for God and obeys him. They (the Shī‘ah) are not known and recognized except for their humility, modesty, fear of God, trustworthiness, plenty of remembrance of God, fasting, service, kindness to the parents, looking after the poor neighbours and afflicted people, mentioning them with nothing except goodness and beneficence; and they are the trustees for their tribes in all the affairs.”

Muhammad al-Baqir (677–733) fifth of the Twelve Shia Imams

Muhammad Kulayni, Usūl al-Kāfī, vol.2, p. 84
Religious Wisdom

God , People , Fear , Parent

“A troubled and afflicted mankind looks to us, pleading for us to keep our rendezvous with destiny; that we will uphold the principles of self-reliance, self-discipline, morality, and, above all, responsible liberty for every individual that we will become that shining city on a hill.”

Ronald Reagan (1911–2004) American politician, 40th president of the United States (in office from 1981 to 1989)

Official Announcement http://www.reaganlibrary.com/reagan/speeches/intent.asp of being a candidate for U.S. President (13 November 1979)
1970s

“Long before physics or psychology were born, pain disintegrated matter, and affliction the soul.”

Emil M. Cioran (1911–1995) Romanian philosopher and essayist

All Gall Is Divided (1952)

Pain , Soul

“Now the nature of man being ever prone to idolatry from the beginning of the world, and the Papists being ready by all means and policy to defend and extol the mass, for their estimation and profit; and the people being superstitiously enamored and doted upon the mass (because they take it for a present remedy against all manners of evils); and part of the princes being blinded by papistical doctrine part loving quietness, and loth to offend their clergy and subjects, and all being captives and subjects to the antichrist of Rome; the state of the world remaining in this case, it is no wonder that abuses grew and increased in the church, that superstition with idolatry were taken for godliness and true religion, and that many things were brought in without the authority of Christ as purgatory, the oblation and sacrificing of Christ by the priest alone; the application and appointing of the same to such persons as the priests would sing or say mass for, and to such abuses, as they could devise; to deliver some from purgatory, and some from hell (if they were not there finally by God determined to abide, as they termed the matter); to hallow and preserve them that went to Jerusalem, to Rome, to St. James in Compostella, and to other places in pilgrimage; for a preservative against tempest and thunder, against perils and dangers of the sea, fora remedy against murrain of cattle, against pensiveness of the heart, and against all manner of affliction and tribulation”

Thomas Cranmer (1489–1556) leader of the English Reformation and Archbishop of Canterbury

Ibid, pp. 517-518, (1809)

Love , God , People , World

“The Atonement of Jesus Christ and the healing it offers do much more than provide the opportunity for repentance from sins. The Atonement also gives us the strength to endure 'pains and afflictions and temptations of every kind,' because our Savior also took upon Him 'the pains and the sicknesses of his people' (Alma 7:11). Brothers and sisters, if your faith and prayers and the power of the priesthood do not heal you from an affliction, the power of the Atonement will surely give you the strength to bear the burden.”

Dallin H. Oaks (1932) Apostle of the LDs Church

He Heals the Heavy Laden https://www.lds.org/general-conference/2006/10/he-heals-the-heavy-laden, Dallin H. Oaks, October 2006

Pain , People , Faith , Sister

“If through your vices you afflicted are,
Lay not the blame of your distress on God;
You made your rulers mighty, gave them guards,
So now you groan 'neath slavery's heavy rod.”

Solón (-638–-558 BC) Athenian legislator

Diogenes Laërtius (trans. C. D. Yonge) The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (1853), "Solon", sect. 5, p. 25.

God

“Labour therefore diligently, that not only out of the time of temptation, but also in the time and conflict of death, when thy conscience is thoroughly afraid with the remembrance of thy sins past, and the devil assaileth thee with great violence, going about to overwhelm thee with heaps, floods and whole seas of sins, to terrify thee, to draw thee from Christ, and to drive thee to despair; that then I say, thou mayest be able to say with sure confidence: Christ the Son of God was given, not for the righteous and holy, but for the unrighteous and sinners…. If he gave himself to death for our sins, then undoubtedly he is no tyrant or judge which will condemn us for our sins. He is no caster-down of the afflicted, but a raiser-up of those that are fallen, a merciful reliever and comforter of the heavy and broken-hearted. Else should Paul lie in saying: "which gave himself for our sins."”

Martin Luther (1483–1546) seminal figure in Protestant Reformation

A Commentary on St. Paul's Epistle to the Galatians (1535. Translation revised 1953 by Philip S Watson. On Galatians 1:4.)

Death , God , Lie , Confidence

“Up till now human life has generally been, as Hobbes described it, "nasty, brutish and short"; the great majority of human beings (if they have not already died young) have been afflicted with misery in one form or another — poverty, disease, ill-health, over-work, cruelty, or oppression. They have attempted to lighten their misery by means of their hopes and their ideals. The trouble has been that the hopes have generally been unjustified, the ideals have generally failed to correspond with reality.
The zestful but scientific exploration of possibilities and of the techniques for realizing them will make our hopes rational, and will set our ideals within the framework of reality, by showing how much of them are indeed realizable.”

Julian Huxley (1887–1975) English biologist, philosopher, author

Transhumanism (1957)

Life , Health , Disease , Hope

“O but we dreamed to mend
Whatever mischief seemed
To afflict mankind, but now
That winds of winter blow
Learn that we were crack-pated when we dreamed.”

W.B. Yeats book The Tower

III, st. 3
The Tower (1928), Nineteen Hundred And Nineteen http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1547/

Dreams , Learning , Winter

“The silent colossal National Lie that is the support and confederate of all the tyrannies and shams and inequalities and unfairnesses that afflict the peoples — that is the one to throw bricks and sermons at.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

"My First Lie, and How I Got Out of It" http://www.mtwain.com/My_First_Lie,_And_How_I_Got_Out_Of_It/0.html, in The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg and Other Stories and Essays (1900)

People , Lie , Support

“Translation:
Human beings are members of a whole,
In creation of one essence and soul. If one member is afflicted with pain,
Other members uneasy will remain. If you have no sympathy for human pain,
The name of human you cannot retain.”

Saadi book Gulistan of Sa'di

Alternative translation:
The children of Adam are limbs of a whole
Having been created of one essence.
When the calamity of time afflicts one limb
The other limbs cannot remain at rest.
If you have no sympathy for the troubles of others
You are not worthy to be called by the name of "man".
Source: Gulistan (1258), Chapter 1, story 10

Pain , Soul

“Greb gave me a terrible whipping. My jaw was swollen from the right temple down the cheek, along the chin and part way up the other side. The referee, the ring itself, was full of my blood. If boxing was afflicted with the commission doctors that we have now, the first fight probably would have been stopped and no one would have heard of me today.”

Harry Greb (1894–1926) American boxer

Former boxing great Gene Tunneyhttp://coxscorner.tripod.com/greb.html

Way , Fight , Parting , Box

“My afflictions belong to me and my art - they have become one with me. Without illness and anxiety, I would have been a rudderless ship... My art is really a voluntary confession and an attempt to explain to myself my relationship with life - it is, therefore, actually a sort of egoism, but I am constantly hoping that through this I can help others achieve clarity.”

Edvard Munch (1863–1944) Norwegian painter and printmaker

As quoted in 'From my rotting body, flowers shall grow, and I am in them, and that is eternity', Potter P. Emerg Infect Dis, 2011
after 1930

Life , Hope , Art , Help

“The believing man hath the Holy Ghost; and where the Holy Ghost dwelleth, He will not suffer a man to be idle, butstirreth him up to all exercises of piety and godliness, and of true religion, to the love of God, to the patient suffering of afflictions, to prayer, to thanksgiving, and the exercise of charity towards all men.”

Martin Luther (1483–1546) seminal figure in Protestant Reformation

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 320

Love , Men , God , Religion

“I thought that a Jewish state would be free of the evils afflicting other societies: theft, murder, prostitution… But now we have them all. And that’s a thing that cuts to the heart …”

Golda Meir (1898–1978) former prime minister of Israel

Fallaci interview (1973)

Evil , Heart

“I must say that I recognized at once that we had never understood the meaning of these words, so common and yet so sacred: Justice, equity, liberty; that concerning each of these principles our ideas have been utterly obscure; and, in fact, that this ignorance was the sole cause, both of the poverty that devours us, and of all the calamities that have ever afflicted the human race.”

Pierre Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865) French politician, mutualist philosopher, economist, and socialist

Source: What is Property? (1840), Ch. I: "Method Pursued in this Work. The Idea of a Revolution"
Context: I have made every effort to obtain exact information, comparing doctrines, replying to objections, continually constructing equations and reductions from arguments, and weighing thousands of syllogisms in the scales of the most rigorous logic. In this laborious work, I have collected many interesting facts which I shall share with my friends and the public as soon as I have leisure. But I must say that I recognized at once that we had never understood the meaning of these words, so common and yet so sacred: Justice, equity, liberty; that concerning each of these principles our ideas have been utterly obscure; and, in fact, that this ignorance was the sole cause, both of the poverty that devours us, and of all the calamities that have ever afflicted the human race.

Justice , Idea

“While, then, every part of our country thus feels an immediate and particular interest in Union, all the parts combined cannot fail to find in the united mass of means and efforts greater strength, greater resource, proportionably greater security from external danger, a less frequent interruption of their peace by foreign nations; and, what is of inestimable value, they must derive from Union an exemption from those broils and wars between themselves, which so frequently afflict neighbouring countries not tied together by the same governments, which their own rivalships alone would be sufficient to produce, but which opposite foreign alliances, attachments, and intrigues would stimulate and embitter. Hence, likewise, they will avoid the necessity of those overgrown military establishments, which, under any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to Republican Liberty. In this sense it is, that your Union ought to be considered as a main prop of your liberty, and that the love of the one ought to endear to you the preservation of the other.”

George Washington (1732–1799) first President of the United States

1790s, Farewell Address (1796)

Peace , Hostility , Country , War

“When Adam ate the apple in the Garden and learned how to multiply and replenish, the other animals learned the Art, too, by watching Adam. It was cunning of them, it was neat; for they got all that was worth having out of the apple without tasting it and afflicting themselves with the disastrous Moral Sense, the parent of all the immoralities.”

Mark Twain book Letters from the Earth

Letters from the Earth (1909)

Learning , Art , Animals , Parent

“He discovered or described hundreds of afflictions and cures, and by testing remedies he concluded “Laughter is the best medicine””

Eduardo Galeano (1940–2015) Uruguayan writer

As quoted in Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone (2009), p. 64

Laughter

“Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.”

James Baldwin (1924–1987) (1924-1987) writer from the United States

“There are no lessons so useful as those learned in the school of affliction.”

J.C. Ryle (1816–1900) Anglican bishop

School , Learning

“Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood.”

H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) American journalist and writer

Idea

“We burned with love for ourselves, all of us, starters of the fire we suffered- our love was the affliction for which only our love was the cure.”

Jonathan Safran Foer (1977) Novelist

Love , Suffering

“The main affliction of our modern civilization is that we don’t know how to handle the suffering inside us and we try to cover it up with all kinds of consumption.”

Thich Nhat Hanh (1926) Religious leader and peace activist

Source: No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering

Suffering

“We are constantly railing against the passions; we ascribe to them all of man’s afflictions, and we forget that they are also the source of all his pleasures”

Denis Diderot book Philosophical thoughts

As translated in Diderot (1977) by Otis Fellows, p. 39
Variant translations:
One declaims endlessly against the passions; one imputes all of man's suffering to them. One forgets that they are also the source of all his pleasures.
Only passions, great passions, can elevate the soul to great things.
Pensées Philosophiques (1746)
Source: Pensées philosophiques
Context: We are constantly railing against the passions; we ascribe to them all of man’s afflictions, and we forget that they are also the source of all his pleasures … But what provokes me is that only their adverse side is considered … and yet only passions, and great passions, can raise the soul to great things. Without them there is no sublimity, either in morals or in creativity. Art returns to infancy, and virtue becomes small-minded.

Pleasure , Passion , Forgetting

“It makes you feel good to know that there's other people afflicted like you.”

Harvey Pekar (1939–2010) writer

People , Feeling

“And I add this part here, to hint to whoever shall read it, that whenever they come to a true Sense of things, they will find Deliverance from Sin a much greater Blessing than Deliverance from Affliction.”

Daniel Defoe La vie et les aventures de Robinson Crusoe

Source: Robinson Crusoe (1719), Ch. 6, Ill and Conscience-stricken.

Reading , Sense , Parting

“Love falls to earth, rises from the ground, pools around the afflicted. Love pulls people back to their feet. Bodies and souls are fed. Bones and lives heal. New blades of grass grow from charred soil. The sun rises.”

Anne Lamott (1954) Novelist, essayist, memoirist, activist

Source: Help Thanks Wow: The Three Essential Prayers

Love , People , Soul , Grass

“Homework is a term that means grown up imposed yet self-afflicting torture.”

James Patterson (1947) American author

Source: School's Out—Forever

“Come, then, affliction, if my Father wills, and be my frowning friend. A friend that frowns is better than a smiling enemy.”

George MacDonald (1824–1905) Scottish journalist, novelist

Smile

“Redemption from sin is greater then redemption from affliction.”

Daniel Defoe La vie et les aventures de Robinson Crusoe

Source: Robinson Crusoe

“We cannot avoid
Using power,
Cannot escape the compulsion
To afflict the world,
So let us, cautious in diction
And mighty in contradiction,
Love powerfully.”

Martin Buber (1878–1965) German Jewish Existentialist philosopher and theologian

"Power and Love" (1926)
Context: p> Every morning
I shall concern myself anew about the boundary
Between the love-deed-Yes and the power-deed-No
And pressing forward honor reality.We cannot avoid
Using power,
Cannot escape the compulsion
To afflict the world,
So let us, cautious in diction
And mighty in contradiction,
Love powerfully.</p

Love , World

“For in the end, he was trying to tell us what afflicted the people in 'Brave New World' was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking.”

Neil Postman (1931–2003) American writer and academic

Source: Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

People , World , Thinking

“Extraordinary afflictions are not always the punishment of extraordinary sins, but sometimes the trial of extraordinary graces.”

Matthew Henry (1662–1714) Theologician from Wales

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 9.
Source: Matthew Henry's Commentary on the Whole Bible

“… some people coddle their own afflictions the way others spoil small pedigreed dogs with cans of pate.”

Lionel Shriver book We Need to Talk About Kevin

Source: We Need to Talk About Kevin

People , Dogs , Way

“The worst disease which can afflict executives in their work is not, as popularly supposed, alcoholism; it's egotism.”

Robert Frost (1874–1963) American poet

Alcohol , Disease

“To see her is a picture-
To hear her is a tune-
To know her an Intemperance
As innocent as June-
To know her not-Affliction-
To own her for a Friend
A warmth as near as if the the Sun
Were shining in your Hand.”

Emily Dickinson book The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

Source: The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

Sun

“Man has to suffer. When he has no real afflictions, he invents some.”

José Martí (1853–1895) Poet, writer, Cuban nationalist leader

Suffering

“Zealots: Wild eyed persons afflicted with incurable certainty about the workings of the world, a certainty that can lead to violence when the world doesn't fit.”

Jonathan Stroud book The Ring of Solomon

Source: The Ring of Solomon

World , Personality

“This word: Thou shalt not be overcome, was said full clearly and full mightily, for assuredness and comfort against all tribulations that may come. He said not: Thou shalt not be tempested, thou shalt not be travailed, thou shalt not be afflicted; but He said: Thou shalt not be overcome. God willeth that we take heed to these words, and that we be ever strong in sure trust, in weal and woe. For He loveth and enjoyeth us, and so willeth He that we love and enjoy Him and mightily trust in Him; and all shall be well.
And soon after, all was close and I saw no more.”

Julian of Norwich book Revelations of Divine Love

The Sixteenth Revelation, Chapter 68
Source: Revelations of Divine Love

Love , God , Strong

“There’s only so long you can feel sorry for a person before you come to feel that their affliction is an act of malice committed by them against you.”

Margaret Atwood book Stone Mattress: Nine Tales

Source: Stone Mattress: Nine Tales

Feeling , Personality

“I don't want to be rude to the afflicted but Uncle Eddie is bald in a way which is the baldest I have ever seen.”

Louise Rennison (1951–2016) British writer

Source: On the Bright Side, I'm Now the Girlfriend of a Sex God

Way

“Revolution will free society of its afflictions, while science will free the individual of his.”

Mario Vargas Llosa book The War of the End of the World

Source: The War of the End of the World

Science

“Resist the temptation to think what afflicts you is peculiar to you. Have faith that what is in your consciousness can be communicated to the consciousness of all. And is, in many cases, already there.”

Alice Walker book The Temple of My Familiar

Source: The Temple of My Familiar

Faith , Communication , Thinking

“Let me tell you I am better acquainted with you for a long Absence, as men are with themselves for a long affliction: Absence does but hold off a friend, to make one see him the truer.”

Alexander Pope (1688–1744) eighteenth century English poet

Letter, written in collaboration with Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke, to Jonathan Swift, December 14, 1725.

Men

“Whin annything was wrote about a man 'twas put this way: "We undhershtand on good authority that M-l-chi H---y, Esquire, is on thrile before Judge G---n on an accusation iv l--c-ny. But we don't think it's true." Nowadays th' larceny is discovered be a newspa-aper. Th' lead pipe is dug up in ye'er back yard be a rayporther who knew it was there because he helped ye bury it. … Th' newspaper does ivrything f'r us. It runs th' polis foorce an' th' banks, commands th' milishy, controls th' ligislachure, baptizes th' young, marries th' foolish, comforts th' afflicted, afflicts th' comfortable, buries th' dead an' roasts thim aftherward. They ain't annything it don't turn its hand to fr'm explainin' th' docthrine iv thransubstantiation to composin' saleratus biskit.”

Finley Peter Dunne (1867–1936) author

"Newspaper Publicity" in Observations by Mr. Dooley (1902) https://books.google.com/books?id=97c_AAAAYAAJ&pg=PA240&dq=%22newspaper+does+ivrything%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwioqKzz5MvPAhUJrD4KHROmCdsQ6AEIIDAA#v=onepage&q=%22newspaper%20does%20ivrything%22&f=false; part of this has sometimes been paraphrased (ignoring its original satiric meaning): The job of the newspaper is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.

Way , Thinking , Help , Dead

“A very bold political measure of Lycurgus is his redistribution of the land. For there was a dreadful inequality in this regard, the city was heavily burdened with indigent and helpless people, and wealth was wholly concentrated in the hands of a few. Determined, therefore, to banish insolence and envy and crime and luxury, and those yet more deep-seated and afflictive diseases of the state, poverty and wealth, he persuaded his fellow-citizens to make one parcel of all their territory and divide it up anew, and to live with one another on a basis of entire uniformity and equality in the means of subsistence, seeking preëminence through virtue alone, assured that there was no other difference or inequality between man and man than that which was established by blame for base actions and praise for good ones.”

Plutarch book Parallel Lives

Lycurgus, sec. 8. The bolded phrase is often quoted in a paraphrase by Ugo Foscolo: "Wealth and poverty are the oldest and most deadly ailments of all republics" (Le ricchezze e la povertà sono le più antiche e mortali infermità delle repubbliche), Monitore Italiano, 5 February 1798.
Parallel Lives

People , Disease , Envy , Wealth

“Pandora, waking: …
I am alone. These faces in the mirrors
Are but the shadows and phantoms of myself;
They cannot help nor hinder. No one sees me,
Save the all-seeing Gods…
She lifts the lid. A dense mist rises from the chest
and fills the room. Pandora falls senseless on
the floor. Storm without.

Chorus of Dreams from the Gate of Horn: …
Fever of the heart and brain,
Sorrow, pestilence, and pain,
Moans of anguish, maniac laughter,
All the evils that hereafter
Shall afflict and vex mankind,
All into the air have risen
From the chambers of their prison;
Only Hope remains behind.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) American poet

The Masque of Pandora and Other Poems (1875)

God , Pain , Dreams , Hope

“In the service no distinction should be made between man and man. We have to serve all, be he a Christian or a Muslim, or a human being of any other persuasion; for calamities, distress and misfortunes make no such distinction but afflict all alike. And in serving to relieve the sufferings of man, let it not be in a spirit of condescension or mere compassion, but in the true spirit of our dharma of surrendering our all in the humble service of Lord who abides in the hearts of all beings.”

M. S. Golwalkar (1906–1973) second head of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh

Quoted from Talreja, K. M. (2000). Holy Vedas and holy Bible: A comparative study. New Delhi: Rashtriya Chetana Sangathan.

Suffering , Heart

“The body of Christ was born to resist in love all that is the enemy of love. This cannot happen, however, until human beings are themselves freed from the illusions that afflict us—that is, until we are "undone."”

Robin Meyers (1952)

Source: Spiritual Defiance (2015), p. 7

Love , Christ

“I would like to express my regret for the harms and wounds that once existed in this island of Taiwan. I also want to extend my apologies to those afflicted with such long-standing and agonizing pains. We must not forget how many families were torn up and how their emotional sufferings have been passed down from generation to generation. I can now relate to such pains. My apology is long overdue.”

James Soong (1942) Chairman of People First Party, former Governor of Taiwan Province

James Soong (2015) cited in " Soong apologizes for his role in Martial Law era http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2015/08/22/2003625919/1" on Taipei Times, 22 August 2015

Pain , Family , Suffering , Forgetting

“Oooh noo, please, it's wicked to mock the afflicted! Well it might be one of your own! Don't laugh at her, she might want paying - I told her this was an audition! She's known to me as Madam Vera Roper, but she's known to everyone else as The English Open!”

Frankie Howerd (1917–1992) British actor

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A744914
Howerd introducing Mrs Vera Roper, his pianist, who was deaf.

“Thus, as it is always darkest just before the day dawneth, so God useth to visit His servants with greatest afflictions when he intendeth their speedy advancement.”

Thomas Fuller (1608–1661) English churchman and historian

A Pisgah Sight of Palestine (1650), Book II, ch. XI.

God

“There's nothing like active employment to console the afflicted.”

Anne Brontë book The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Source: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), Ch. XLVII : Startling Intelligence; Eliza to Gilbert

“O suffering, sad humanity!
O ye afflicted ones, who lie
Steeped to the lips in misery,
Longing, yet afraid to die,
Patient, though sorely tried!”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) American poet

The Goblet of Life, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Lie , Sadness , Suffering

“But if man's affection be one of passion, then it is moved also in regard to other animals: for since the passion of pity is caused by the afflictions of others; and since it happens that even irrational animals are sensible to pain, it is possible for the affection of pity to arise in a man with regard to the sufferings of animals. Now it is evident that if a man practice a pitiful affection for animals, he is all the more disposed to take pity on his fellow-men: wherefore it is written (Prov. 12:10): "The just regardeth the lives of his beasts: but the bowels of the wicked are cruel." Consequently the Lord, in order to inculcate pity to the Jewish people, who were prone to cruelty, wished them to practice pity even with regard to dumb animals, and forbade them to do certain things savoring of cruelty to animals. Hence He prohibited them to "boil a kid in the milk of its dam"; and to "muzzle the ox that treadeth out the corn"; and to slay "the dam with her young."”

Thomas Aquinas book Summa Theologica

I-II, q. 102, art. 6 ad. 8
Summa Theologica (1265–1274)

Men , Pain , People , Suffering

“The beings closest to us, whether in love or hate, are often virtually our interpreters of the world, and some feather-headed gentleman or lady whom in passing we regret to take as legal tender for a human being may be acting as a melancholy theory of life in the minds of those who live with them — like a piece of yellow and wavy glass that distorts form and makes colour an affliction. Their trivial sentences, their petty standards, their low suspicions, their loveless ennui, may be making somebody else's life no better than a promenade through a pantheon of ugly idols.”

George Eliot book Daniel Deronda

Daniel Deronda (1876)

Love , Life , Hate , World

“In all living beings exists the self-benediction, ‘would that I were never to cease. May I live on’. And this self-benediction cannot exist in him who has not experienced the nature of death. And by this experience of a former life is inferred. This is the affliction of Love of Life, which flows by its own potency.”

Vyasa central and revered figure in most Hindu traditions

In pp. 104-105.
Sources, The Yoga Darsana Of Patanjali With The Sankhya Pravacana Commentary Of Vyasa

Love , Life , Death , Nature

“In 1894, historian Theodor Mommsen wrote that the root cause of the anti-Semitic ‘affliction’ was ‘envy and the basest instincts,… a barbaric hatred for education, freedom, and humanism.”

Götz Aly (1947) German journalist, historian and social scientist

Source: Why the Germans? Why the Jews?: Envy, Race Hatred, and the Prehistory of the Holocaust (2011), p. 31

Education , Freedom , Envy

“While our common country has been afflicted, and still suffers, from the greatest calamity a people can experience, our own State has been visited by scourges which, though relieved from the horrors of civil war, has resulted in the loss of immense quantities of property, the depriving of many of our citizens of their homes, or the means of support, and seriously crippling, for the present, the Agricultural interests of the State. Indeed, the high waters of December last did more than destroy property, and desolate homes; and many human lives were lost, while attempting to escape the floods, or generously assisting to relieve others from their perils.”

John Whiteaker (1820–1902) American politician

John Whiteaker (September 8, 1862). Governor John Whiteaker - Governor's Message, 1862 http://records.sos.state.or.us/ORSOSWebDrawer/RecordView/6777832. Oregon State Archives, Oregon Secretary of State. Source: House and Senate Journal, Salem, Oregon, Henry L. Pittock, State Printer, 1862: Proceedings of the House, Appendix to the House Journal, Page 3.

War , People , Home , Support

“…your letter has arrived…Safdar Jang had reached such a state (of damnation) that his foot got afflicted with cancer. The more they removed the (affected) flesh from his foot, the worse it became. At last, they were forced to amputate his foot. Finally, he passed away in this piteous condition. It means that Allah’s wrath against the Marhatahs and the Jats has now become manifest, and the defeat and destruction of these people has been decided at the occult level.”

Shah Waliullah Dehlawi (1703–1762) Indian muslim scholar

To Shah Muhammad Ashiq Pahalti Translated from the Urdu version of K.A. Nizami, Shãh Walîullah Dehlvî ke Siyãsî Maktûbãt, Second Edition, Delhi, 1969, pp. 125-26.
From his letters

People

“I believe in comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable.”

Halford E. Luccock (1885–1960) American Methodist minister

Described as his slogan in "Religion : Go Ye and Relax?" in TIME magazine (20 April 1953) http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,822783,00.html; this paraphrases the expression of Finley Peter Dunne, in Observations by Mr. Dooley (1902): Th' newspaper does ivrything f'r us. It runs th' polis foorce an' th' banks, commands th' milishy, controls th' ligislachure, baptizes th' young, marries th' foolish, comforts th' afflicted, afflicts th' comfortable, buries th' dead an' roasts thim aftherward.