Quotes about suffering

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“… children have the resilience to outlive their sufferings, if given a chance.”

“If you meet a woman of whatever complexion who sails her life with strength and grace and assurance, talk to her! And what you will find is that there has been a suffering, that at some time she has left herself for hanging dead.”

“Yes, I was a fool, but I was in love, and though I was suffering the greatest misery I had ever known I would not have had it otherwise for all the riches of Barsoom. Such is love, and such are lovers wherever love is known.”

“Pain is the feeling. Suffering is the effect the pain inflicts. If one can endure pain, one can live without suffering. If one can withstand pain, one can withstand anything. If one can learn to control pain, one can learn to control oneself.”

“When you're older you'll know what people who love suffer. The agony. It's better to be cold and young than to love. It's happened to me before but never like this - so accidental - just when everything was going well.”

“You suffer from the oldest delusion in politics. You think you can change the world by talking to a leader. Leaders are the effects, not the causes of changes.”

“Buddha says there are two kinds of suffering: the kind that leads to more suffering and the kind that brings an end to suffering.”

“I hope suffering don't exist.”

“Do you eat chicken because you are familiar with the scientific literature on them and have decided that their suffering doesn't matter, or do you do it because it tastes good?”

“Each snowflake was a sigh heard by an aggrieved woman somewhere in the world. All the sighs drifted up the sky, gathered into clouds, then broke into tiny pieces that fell silently on the people below. As a reminder of how women suffer.”

“I'm choosing happiness over suffering, I know I am. I'm making space for the unknown future to fill up my life with yet-to-come surprises.”

“When it's gone, you'll know what a gift love was. You'll suffer like this. So go back and fight to keep it.”

“Perhaps it's good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he's happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?”

“If you are waiting for anything in order to live and love without holding back, then you suffer.”

“The Buddhists say there are 121 states of consciousness. Of these, only three involve misery or suffering. Most of us spend our time moving back and forth between these three.”

“[S]he believed that the Buddhists were right–that if you want, you will suffer; if you love, you will grieve. (68)”

“Stupidity and wisdom meet in the same centre of sentiment and resolution, in the suffering of human accidents.”

“In a world where everyone struggles to survive whatever the cost, how could one judge those people who decide to die? No one can judge. Each person knows the extent of their own suffering or the total absence of meaning in their lives.”

“To suffer without complaint is the only lesson we have to learn in this life”

“Without pain, there would be no suffering. Without suffering, we would never learn from our mistakes. To make it right, pain and suffering is the key to all windows, without it, there is no way of life.”

“Stunned and still not suffering. Swollen with care and anxiety and still not suffering. Useless, old and full of grief, but still not suffering.”

“I hammered him with my fists. He just stood and took it. He didn't suffer graciously, he looked pissed off to no end. But he let me hit him. And he didn't hit me back.”

“I guess I felt attached to my weakness. My pain and suffering too. Summer light, the smell of a breeze, the sound of cicadas - if I like these things, why should I apologize?”

“It's the sorrow you feel that allows you to crave love. Without the suffering, there would be no true pleasure. Without tears, no joy. Without deficiency, no longing. This is the secret of the human heart, Rom.”

“All the suffering there is in this world arises from wishing our self to be happy. All the happiness there is in this world arises from wishing others to be happy.”

“Nonviolent action, born of the awareness of suffering and nurtured by love, is the most effective way to confront adversity.”

“Surrender… sacrificing my life or suffering in order to change what needs to be changed”

“Sometimes one has suffered enough to have the right to never say: I am too happy.”

“Happiness is not a reward - it is a consequence. Suffering is not a punishment - it is a result.”

“There is suffering in life, and there are defeats. No one can avoid them. But it's better to lose some of the battles in the struggles for your dreams than to be defeated without ever knowing what you're fighting for.”

“Stories distribute the suffering so that it can be borne.”

“In order not to suffer, you had to renounce love. It was like putting out your own eyes in order not to see the bad things in life.”

“Nothing a man suffers will prevent him from inflicting suffering on others. Indeed, it will teach him the way”

“It is that we are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love, never no helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object of its love.”

“It is better to look suffering straight in the eye, acknowledge and respect it’s presence, and then get busy as soon as possible focusing on things we choose to focus on.”

“I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides.”

“Always make the audience suffer as much as possible.”

“I never meant it," he was saying.
"Never meant it to happen. Can't stand it,
seeing her suffer. Must do something, do something… What do I do? What can I do…?”

“They will be like shadows, they will be like wraiths, gray members of a congregation of nightmare; hark! his long wavering howl… an aria of fear made audible.
The wolfsong is the sound of the rending you will suffer, in itself a murdering.”

“Added to their loveliness was a new mysterious suffering, perfectly silent, visible in the blue puffiness beneath their eyes or the way they would sometimes stop in mid-stride, look down, and shake their heads as though disagreeing with life.”

“There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and to have recovered hope.”

“Everyone suffers at least one bad betrayal in their lifetime. It’s what unites us. The trick is not to let it destroy your trust in others when that happens. Don’t let them take that from you.”

“I am certain that a Sewing Machine would relieve as much human suffering as a hundred Lunatic Asylums, and possibly a good deal more.”

“I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.”

“Again and again I will suffer; again and again I will get back on my feet. I will not be defeated. I won't let my spirit be destroyed.”

“You'll need to suffer to make any real art.”

“We are all brothers and we are all suffering the same fate. The same smoke floats over all our heads. Help one another. It is the only way to survive. (pg. 39)”

“When to stopped wishing things wouldn't fall apart, you'd stop suffering when they did.”

“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.”

“We all suffer under a curse, the curse that we know more than we can endure, and there is nothing, absolutely nothing we can do about the force and the lure of this knowledge.”

“I have suffered two grave accidents in my life, one in which a streetcar knocked me down… The other accident is Diego.”

“You suffer the blow, but you capitalize on the opportunity left in its wake.”

“If happy I can be I will, if suffer I must I can.”

“Whether I or anyone else accepted the concept of alcoholism as a disease didn't matter; what mattered was that when treated as a disease, those who suffered from it were most likely to recover.”

“One of the principal functions of a friend is to suffer (in a milder and symbolic form) the punishments that we should like, but are unable, to inflict upon our enemies.”

“In light of heaven, the worst suffering on earth will be seen to be no more serious than one night in an inconvenient hotel.”

“I believe there is a reason such as autism, severe manic-depression, and schizophrenia remain in our gene pool even though there is much suffering as a result.”

“There is the solitude of suffering, when you go through darkness that is lonely, intense, and terrible. Words become powerless to express your pain; what others hear from your words is so distant and different from what you are actually suffering.”

“My suffering left me sad and gloomy.”

“Women were supposed to be the enigmas, but men? Moody, brooding bastards, the lot of them. A woman with PMS had nothing on a man. Where women might get hormonal once a month, men suffered their own brand of PMS on a daily basis.
- Faith”

“creative people always suffer from depression because we're so
super sensitive and special?”

“Perhaps it is better to wake up after all, even to suffer, rather than to remain a dupe to illusions all one's life.”

“For as long as he could remember, he’d suffered from a vague nagging feeling of being not all there.”

“Congratulations, love. You traded up. Does he treat you well?'
'He's a teddy bear,' I said.
Teddy bear looked like he was suffering from murder withdrawal.

(Rene and Kate on Jim!)”

“… it will always remain my private persuasion that Nature was absorbed in making cabbages when Mrs. Vesey was born, and that the good lady suffered the consequences of a vegetable preoccupation in the mind of the Mother of us all.”

“I was starting to come to grips with the fact that I had created a lot of pain and suffering around me, not just within me.”

“Yet who can say how our souls have been stamped by witnessing such a cruel drama? All souls are hostages to their human envelopes, but souls must decay and suffer at such indignity, don't you agree?”

“In a typical mental health catch-22, the alienating nature of depression tends to keep its sufferers from finding their way to the very support groups that might help them.”

“The devil has put a penalty on all things we enjoy in life. Either we suffer in our health, or we suffer in our soul, or we get fat.”

“Shame, isn’t it? That we only like our heroes out in the street when they are looking their best and their uniforms are ‘spit and polished,’ and not when they’re showing us the wounds they suffered on our behalf.”

“We have to endure the discordance between imagination and fact. It is better to say, “I am suffering,” than to say, “This landscape is ugly.”

“Sometimes you suffer for the things that are important to you.”

“When the stakes are this high- when calling God by the right name can make the difference between eternal happiness and eternal suffering, it is impossible to respect the beliefs of others who don't believe as you do.”

“Music could ache and hurt, that beautiful music was a place a suffering man could hide.”

“As long as one suffers one lives.”

“I will not deny but that the best apology against false accusers is silence and sufferance, and honest deeds set against dishonest words.”

“…. it is of the very essence of Christianity to face suffering and death not because they are good, not because they have meaning, but because the resurrection of Jesus has robbed them of their meaning.”

“When one person suffers from a delusion it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Religion.”

“This poem has been called obscure. I refuse to believe that it is obscurer than pity, violence, or suffering. But being a poem, not a lifetime, it is more compressed.”

“It is possible to suffer and despair an entire lifetime and still not give up the art of laughter.”

“Do they always flirt with biblical quotes?" Asil asked Tad.

In long-suffering tones, Tad said, "They can flirt with the periodic table or a restaurant menu. We've learned to live with it. Get a room you guys.”

“That's why we read fiction, isn't it? To remind us that whatever we suffer, we're not the only ones?”

“He who suffers conquers.”
Vincit qui patitur.

“Don't say mourning. It's too psychoanalytic. I'm not mourning. I'm suffering.”

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

“It's not that I don't suffer, it's that I know the unimportance of suffering. I know that pain is to be fought and thrown aside, not to be accepted as part of one's soul and as a permanent scar across one's view of existence.”

“The poet makes himself a voyant through a long, immense reasoned deranging of all his senses. All the forms of love, of suffering, of madness; he tries to find himself, he exhausts in himself all the poisons, to keep only their quintessences.”

“People, he thought, were as hungry for a sight of joy as he had always been--for a moment's relief from that gray load of suffering which seemed so inexplicable and unnecessary. He had never been able to understand why men should be unhappy.”

“Like all strong people, she suffered always a measure of loneliness; she was a marginal outsider, a secret infidel of a certain sort.”

“The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.”

“Magnus did not take such suffering lightly, but even mortals did not die of broken hearts. No matter how cruel Grace had been, he told himself, James would heal. Even though he was a Herondale.”

“You're a man who has suffered and wants revenge,' she said. 'Your heart is dead, your soul is in darkness. The devil by your side is smiling because you are playing the game he invented.”

“Even if she be not harmed, her heart may fail her in so much and so many horrors; and hereafter she may suffer--both in waking, from her nerves, and in sleep, from her dreams.”

“I don't suffer from insanity. I can actually say that I enjoy it.”

“In our nature, however, there is a provision, alike marvelous and merciful, that the sufferer should never know the intensity of what he endures by its present torture, but chiefly by the pang that rankles after it.”

“By engaging in a delusive quest for happiness, we bring only suffering upon ourselves. In our frantic search for something to quench our thirst, we overlook the water all around us and drive ourselves into exile from our own lives.”

“As my sufferings mounted I soon realized that there were two ways in which I could respond to my situation -- either to react with bitterness or seek to transform the suffering into a creative force. I decided to follow the latter course.”

“I'm on such a dangerous road, Milena. You're standing firmly near a tree, young, beautiful, your eyes subduing with their radiance the suffering world.”

“Isn’t it only through laughter that we become one with the gods and thus can endure life and can overcome all the horror and waste and suffering here on earth? …Isn’t it only through laughter we can stay human?”