Quotes about suffering
page 8

“As a confirmed melancholic, I can testify that the best and maybe only antidote for melancholia is action. However, like most melancholics, I suffer also from sloth.”

Edward Abbey (1927–1989) American author and essayist

Source: A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto) (1990), Ch. 4 : Life and Death and All That p.43

Depressing

“Happiness is pure kitsch; we come into the world to suffer and learn.”

Isabel Allende book La somma dei giorni

Source: La suma de los días

Happiness, World, Learning

“A student, filled with emotion and crying, implored, "Why is there so much suffering?"

Suzuki Roshi replied, "No reason.”

Shunryu Suzuki (1904–1971) Japanese Buddhist missionary

Source: Zen Is Right Here: Teaching Stories and Anecdotes of Shunryu Suzuki, Author of "ZEN Mind, Beginner's Mind"

Cry

“Contrary to what we may have been taught to think, unnecessary and unchosen suffering wounds us but need not scar us for life. It does mark us. What we allow the mark of our suffering to become is in our own hands.”

Bell Hooks book All About Love: New Visions

Source: All About Love: New Visions

Life, Thinking

“I suffer migraines. I do not suffer fools. I like a twist of meaning. I endure.”

E. Lockhart book We Were Liars

Variant: I suffer migraines. I do not suffer fools.
Source: We Were Liars

Fools

“Was there a language of loss? Did everyone who suffered speak a different dialect?”

Jodi Picoult book Handle With Care

Source: Handle with Care

Loss

“The pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it, and it kills in many instances because its anguish can no longer be borne.”

William Styron book Darkness Visible

Source: Darkness Visible (1990), III
Context: This general unawareness of what depression is really like was apparent most recently in the matter of Primo Levi, the remarkable Italian writer and survivor of Auschwitz who, at the age of sixty-seven, hurled himself down a stairwell in Turin in 1987. Since my own involvement with the illness, I had been more than ordinarily interested in Levi’s death, and so, late in 1988, when I read an account in The New York Times about a symposium on the writer and his work held at New York University, I was fascinated but, finally, appalled. For, according to the article, many of the participants, worldly writers and scholars, seemed mystified by Levi’s suicide, mystified and disappointed. It was as if this man whom they had all so greatly admired, and who had endured so much at the hands of the Nazis — a man of exemplary resilience and courage — had by his suicide demonstrated a frailty, a crumbling of character they were loath to accept. In the face of a terrible absolute — self-destruction — their reaction was helplessness and (the reader could not avoid it) a touch of shame.
My annoyance over all this was so intense that I was prompted to write a short piece for the op-ed page of the Times. The argument I put forth was fairly straightforward: the pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it, and it kills in many instances because its anguish can no longer be borne. The prevention of many suicides will continue to be hindered until there is a general awareness of the nature of this pain. Through the healing process of time — and through medical intervention or hospitalization in many cases — most people survive depression, which may be its only blessing; but to the tragic legion who are compelled to destroy themselves there should be no more reproof attached than to the victims of terminal cancer.

Pain, Depressing

“Stories are the only enchantment possible, for when we begin to see our suffering as a story, we are saved.”

Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) writer of novels, short stories, and erotica

“Attachment to being right creates suffering. When you have a choice to be right, or to be kind, choose kind and watch your suffering disappear.”

Wayne W. Dyer (1940–2015) American writer

“The source of love is deep in us and we can help others realize a lot of happiness. One word, one action, one thought can reduce another person’s suffering and bring that person joy.”

Thich Nhat Hanh (1926) Religious leader and peace activist

Love, Happiness, Help, Joy

“How torture is torture and humiliation is humiliation only when you choose to suffer.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Choke

Variant: Torture is torture and humiliation is humiliation only when you choose to suffer.
Source: Choke

“We create our fate every day… most of the ills we suffer from are directly traceable to our own behavior.”

Henry Miller (1891–1980) American novelist

Fate, Behavior

“Humanity's true moral test, its fundamental test, consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect humankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), as quoted in Milan Kundera (2003) by Harold Bloom, [//books.google.it/books?id=SXDojRJFMPIC&pg=PA91 p. 91]
Context: True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power. Mankind's true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude toward those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect mankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it.

Animals

“I think that, with age, people come to realize that death is inevitable. And we need to learn to face it with serenity, wisdom and resignation. Death often frees us from a lot of senseless sufferings.”

Paulo Coelho book The Devil and Miss Prym

Source: The Devil and Miss Prym

Death, Wisdom, People, Age

“Is it fair to have given us the memory of what was and the desire of what could be when we must suffer what is?”

Neil Jordan (1950) Irish filmmaker and fiction writer

Source: The Dream of a Beast

Memory

“History does not care about the suffering of the individual. Only the outcome of their struggles.”

Alison Goodman (1966) Australian science-fiction writer

Source: Eona: The Last Dragoneye

History

“We must laugh and cry, enjoy and suffer, in a word, vibrate to our full capacity … I think that’s what being really human means.”

Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880) French writer (1821–1880)

Thinking, Cry

“My heart is afraid that it will have to suffer.”

Paulo Coelho book The Alchemist

Source: The Alchemist

Heart

“No man knows till he has suffered from the night how sweet and dear to his heart and eye the morning can be.”

Bram Stoker book Dracula

Jonathan Harker
Source: Dracula (1897)

Heart, Night

“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 most.”

Thomas Merton book The Seven Storey Mountain

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.

Fear, Hurt

“You are wasting time by suffering twice. I mention this only to show how many things the mind cannot will itself to do, even if it wants to.”

Elizabeth Strout (1956) American writer

Source: My Name is Lucy Barton

Time

“Anybody who has the courage to raise his eyes and look sanely at the awful human condition… must realize finally that tiny periods of temporary release from intolerable suffering is the most that any individual has the right to expect.”

Flann O'Brien (1911–1966) Irish writer

Courage

“The measure of a man is not how much he suffers in the test, but how he comes out at the end.”

Neal Shusterman (1962) American novelist

Source: UnWholly

“People with lost personalities will suffer a great deal more than those with lost virginities.”

Melina Marchetta (1965) Australian teen writer

Source: Saving Francesca

People, Personality

“Yea, and if some god shall wreck me in the wine-dark deep,
even so I will endure…
For already have I suffered full much,
and much have I toiled in perils of waves and war.
Let this be added to the tale of those.”

Homér The Odyssey (Cowper)

Source: The Odyssey

God, War, Wine

“Beautiful. All this suffering at the moment of destruction.”

Naoko Takeuchi (1967) Japanese manga artist

Beauty

“No healthy Christian ever chooses suffering; he chooses God's will, as Jesus did, whether it means suffering or not.”

Oswald Chambers (1874–1917) British missionary

God

“To be weak is miserable,
Doing or suffering.”

John Milton book Paradise Lost

Source: Paradise Lost

“I don't suppose it would help if I told you that is the way life is. The good suffer, the evil flourish, and all that is mortal passes away.”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Princess

Variant: Pointless, needless suffering and pain? I don’t suppose it would help if I told you that was the way life is. The good suffer, the evil flourish, and all that is mortal passes away.
Source: Clockwork Princess

Life, Way, Evil, Help

“To be interested in something is to be involved in what is essentially a stressful relationship with that thing, to suffer anxiety on its behalf.”

Geoff Dyer (1958) English writer

Source: Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling With D.H. Lawrence

“The most authentic thing about us is our capacity to create, to overcome, to endure, to transform, to love and to be greater than our suffering.”

Ben Okri (1959) Nigerian writer

Love, Inspirational

“Obeying orders just to obey is the mark of a person who has ceased to think. Remember, it is better to suffer for doing what is right rather than for doing what is wrong.”

Ilsa J. Bick (1957) American writer

Source: Ashes

Thinking, Personality

“All my life I've learned to suffer in silence.”

Paulo Coelho (1947) Brazilian lyricist and novelist

Source: The Witch of Portobello (2007), p. 41.
Source: The Witch Of Portobello

Life, Silence, Learning

“You know what my philosophy of life is? That it’s important to have some laughs, but you got to suffer a little too, because otherwise you miss the whole point to life.”

Woody Allen (1935) American screenwriter, director, actor, comedian, author, playwright, and musician

Life

“Look at your body—
A painted puppet, a poor toy
Of jointed parts ready to collapse,
A diseased and suffering thing
With a head full of false imaginings.”

Thomas Ligotti (1953) American horror author

Description: from the The Dhammapada
Source: The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror (2010)

Disease, Imagination, Parting, Painting

“The innocent should never have to suffer from the battles of others. (Valerius)
I know, but it seems to always be the case. (Acheron)
A furore infra, libera nos - spare us from the fury within. (Valerius)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Bad Moon Rising

“Time is not the great teacher. Experience is. A man may live a whole life, but if he never leaves his home to experience that life, he dies knowing nothing. A mere child who has suffered and lived can be the wiser of the two.”

Lynsay Sands Canadian writer

Source: Love Bites

Life, Home, Teachers, Time

“The suffering of a loved one was in many ways worse than one's one suffering because it left one feeling so very helpless.”

Mary Balogh (1944) Welsh-Canadian novelist

Source: First Comes Marriage

Love, Way, Feeling

“You will suffer, son of Hades!’
What else is new? Nico thought.”

Rick Riordan book The Blood of Olympus

Source: The Blood of Olympus

“I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.”

T.S. Eliot (1888–1965) 20th century English author

"Preludes" (1917), § IV

“Suffering is humbling. It pays to know how to get your butt kicked.”

Christopher McDougall (1962) American journalist and writer

Source: Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen

“I would rather die than ever see you suffering this way. I don't want you or any child I ever have or any woman I ever love to go through or feel what you're going through, but it's happened and I don't know what to do.”

Melina Marchetta book Looking for Alibrandi

Source: Looking for Alibrandi

Love, Way, Feeling

“You must be like me; you must suffer in rhythm.”

Jean Paul Sartre book Nausea

Source: Nausea

“If good things are coming, they will be a pleasant surprise," said the seer. "If bad things are, and you know in advance, you will suffer greatly before they even occur.”

Paulo Coelho book The Alchemist

Source: The Alchemist (1988), p. 102.

“All human suffering concerns each human being”

Václav Havel (1936–2011) playwright, essayist, poet, dissident and 1st President of the Czech Republic

“We bereaved are not alone. We belong to the largest company in all the world--the company of those who have known suffering.”

Helen Keller (1880–1968) American author and political activist

Source: We Bereaved

World

“There is something more terrible than a hell of suffering--a hell of boredom.”

Victor Hugo book Les Misérables

Source: Les Misérables

Hell

“Suffer. You could say it means endure, but that's not exactly right”

E. Lockhart book We Were Liars

Source: We Were Liars

“Adults had the notion that juveniles needed to suffer. Only when they had suffered enough to wipe out most of their naturally joyous spirits and innocence were they staid enough to be considered mature. An adult was essentially a broken-down child.”

Piers Anthony book Centaur Aisle

Source: Centaur Aisle

Nature

“Truth gains more even by the errors of one who, with due study and preparation, thinks for himself, than by the true opinions of those who only hold them because they do not suffer themselves to think.”

John Stuart Mill book On Liberty

Source: On Liberty (1859), Ch. II: Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion

Truth, Error, Thinking, Study

“What right had they to make me suffer like that?”

Anna Sewell book Black Beauty

Source: Black Beauty

“Its unfortunate and I really wish I wouldn't have to say this, but I really like human beings who have suffered. They're kinder.”

Emma Thompson (1959) British actress and writer

“Me miserable! Which way shall I fly
Infinite wrath and infinite despair?
Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell;
And in the lowest deep a lower deep,
Still threat'ning to devour me, opens wide,
To which the hell I suffer seems a heaven.”

John Milton book Paradise Lost

Source: Paradise Lost

Way, Hell, Flying, Despair

“She wrote, I wish I could be a girl again, with a chance to live my life again. I have suffered so much more than I needed to. And the joys I have felt have not always been joyous. I could have lived differently.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Life, Girl, Chance, Joy

“The paradox of vengefulness is that it makes men dependent upon those who have harmed them, believing that their release from pain will come only when their tormentors suffer.”

Laura Hillenbrand book Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

Source: Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

Men, Pain, Dependency

“George MacDonald gives me renewed strength during times of trouble--times when I have seen people tempted to deny God--when he says, "The Son of God suffered unto death, not that men might not suffer, but that their sufferings might be like his.”

Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) American writer

Source: Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art

Death, Men, God, People

“When one individual comes into intimate contact with another, she—or he, of course, as the case may be—must almost inevitably receive or inflict suffering.”

Aldous Huxley book Crome Yellow

Source: Crome Yellow

“To not have your suffering recognized is an almost unbearable form of violence.”

Andrei Lankov (1963) Russian academic

“Helplessness in the face of a child's suffering is the curse of parenthood.”

Nancy Atherton (1955) American writer

Source: Aunt Dimity's Good Deed

“Yotsuba: I’ll get revenge! … I’m going!

Jumbo (in a suffering manner): Yotsuba… please, come back alive…

Yotsuba (heroic): Alright. Even if I die… I’ll come back alive.

—–Yotsuba!”

Kiyohiko Azuma (1968) Japanese manga artist

Source: Yotsuba&!, Vol. 03

Revenge

“I hated every minute of it. But I said to myself, 'Suffer now, and live the rest of your life as a champion.”

Muhammad Ali (1942–2016) African American boxer, philanthropist and activist

On training, as quoted in "Ali: Born Again!" by Pete Axthelm and Peter Bonventre, Newsweek (25 September 1978)

Life, Hate

“Who will tell whether one happy moment of love or the joy of breathing or walking on a bright morning and smelling the fresh air, is not worth all the suffering and effort which life implies”

Erich Fromm (1900–1980) German social psychologist and psychoanalyst

Love, Life, Happiness, Effort

“Throwing things horrified me. I suffered extreme, paralyzing anxiety when it came to anything remotely athletic. I wouldn't even run to catch the school bus because I knew I'd trip and then get teased for a year.”

Augusten Burroughs Possible Side Effects

Source: Possible Side Effects

School

“Those who have suffered understand suffering and therefore extend their hand.”

Patti Smith (1946) American singer-songwriter, poet and visual artist

Understanding

“Suffering is not enough. Life is both dreadful and wonderful… How can I smile when I am filled with so much sorrow? It is natural--you need to smile to your sorrow because you are more than your sorrow.”

Thich Nhat Hanh (1926) Religious leader and peace activist

Life, Smile, Nature

“How vast was a human being's capacity for suffering. The only thing you could do was stand in awe of it. It wasn't a question of survival at all. It was the fullness of it, how much could you hold, how much could you care.”

Janet Fitch book White Oleander

Source: White Oleander

Question

“In my case, literature is a kind of revenge. It's something that gives me what real life can't give me - all the adventures, all the suffering. All the experiences I can only live in the imagination, literature completes.”

Mario Vargas Llosa (1936) Peruvian writer, politician, journalist, and essayist

Life, Imagination, Literature, Revenge

“Compassion refers to the arising in the heart of the desire to relieve the suffering of all beings.”

Ram Dass (1931–2019) American contemporary spiritual teacher and the author of the 1971 book Be Here Now

Heart

“Joy is a mystery because it can happen anywhere, anytime, even under the most unpromising circumstances, even in the midst of suffering, with tears in its eyes….”

Frederick Buechner (1926) Poet, novelist, short story writer, theologian

Tear, Joy

“There is both joy and suffering on planet Earth because this beautiful world is a world of duality - a world of opposites. There is an opposite side to everything.”

Rhonda Byrne (1951) Australian writer and producer

Source: Hero

World, Beauty, Joy

“He decided that we suffer from great temporal homesickness for the decade we were born in.”

Thomas Pynchon book V.

Source: V.

“We are not as Christ-centered and cross-cherishing as we should be, because we do not ponder the truth that everything good, and everything bad that God turns for the good, was purchased by the sufferings of Christ.”

John Piper (1946) American writer

Source: The Passion of Jesus Christ

God, Truth, Christ

“My mind… It's who I am. I think I'd rather suffer any other injury in the world than have my mind tampered with.”

Richelle Mead book The Golden Lily

Source: The Golden Lily

World, Thinking

“Creating means vandalizing the lives of other people, turning them into unwilling and unwitting participants. You steal their desires, their dreams, pocket their flaws, their suffering. You take what does not belong to you. You do this knowingly.”

Khaled Hosseini book And the Mountains Echoed

Source: And the Mountains Echoed

People, Dreams

“Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.”

George Lucas (1944) American film producer

Source: Star Wars - Episode I: The Phantom Menace

Hate, Fear, Anger

“Shared suffering, she’d found, was no guarantee of intimacy.”

Michel Faber book Under the Skin

Source: Under the Skin

“[Harry] had always suffered from a vague restlessness, a longing for adventure that she told herself severely was the result of reading too many novels when she was a small child.”

Robin McKinley book The Blue Sword

Source: The Blue Sword

Reading

“I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.

Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.”

T.S. Eliot book The Waste Land

Source: The Waste Land and Other Poems

Women, World

“In the sky there are always answers and explanations for everything: every pain, every suffering, joy and confusion.”

Ishmael Beah book A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier

Source: A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier

Pain, Joy

“I ask one thing only: I ask for the right to hope, to suffer as I do. But if even that cannot be, command me to disappear, and I disappear. You shall not see me if my presence is distasteful to you.”

Leo Tolstoy book Anna Karenina

Source: Anna Karenina

Hope

“Then I reminded myself that all intelligent children suffer bad dreams.”

Grant Morrison (1960) writer

Source: Batman: Arkham Asylum - A Serious House on Serious Earth

Children, Dreams, Intelligence

“What suffering has taught me is the uselessness of suffering.”

Bernard Malamud (1914–1986) American author

“Nino has something that's eating him inside, like Lila, and it's a gift and a suffering; they aren't content, they never give in, they fear what is happening around them.”

Elena Ferrante book My Brilliant Friend

Source: My Brilliant Friend

Fear

“The great question in life is the suffering we cause, and the most ingenious metaphysics do not justify the man who has broken the heart that loved him.”

Benjamin Constant Adolphe

Source: Adolphe

Love, Life, Question, Heart

“They are committing the greatest indignity human beings can inflict on one another: telling people who have suffered excruciating pain and loss that their pain and loss were illusions.”

Elie Wiesel book Night

Misattributed <br class="br">Source: Robert McAfee Brown https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_McAfee_Brown. Preface for the 25th anniversary edition of Night https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_%28book%29. Page v, Bantam Books paperback; 1982 reissue edition.

Pain, People, Loss