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“The doctrine of eternal punishment is the infamy of infamies. As I have often said, the man who believes in eternal torment, in the justice of endless pain, is suffering from at least two diseases—petrifaction of the heart and putrefaction of the brain.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

A Christmas Sermon (1890)

“Oh, when a mother meets on high
The babe she lost in infancy,
Hath she not then for pains and fears,
The day of woe, the watchful night,
For all her sorrow, all her tears,
An over-payment of delight?”

Robert Southey (1774–1843) British poet

Canto X, st. 11.
The Curse of Kehama (1810)

“Short stories
that's all it's ever been
Don't you worry 'bout the ending
Babe, before we begin
I have seen the sun
That's behind the rain
I have felt the joy
That's behind the pain.”

Harry Chapin (1942–1981) American musician

Short Stories
Song lyrics, Short Stories (1974)

“The holiest, cruellest pains I feel,
Die stillborn, because old men squeal
For something new: "Write something new:
We've read this poem — that one too,
And twelve more like 'em yesterday?"”

Robert Graves (1895–1985) English poet and novelist

"To An Ungentle Critic"
Fairies and Fusiliers (1917)

“I've had my share of pleasure and I've tasted pain
I never thought that I would touch an angel's wing
There's a journey in my eyes
It's getting hard for me to hide
Like the ocean at the sunrise.”

Anastacia (1968) American singer-songwriter

Heavy on My Heart
Anastacia (2004)

“Don't forget your second wind;
Sooner or later you'll get your second wind.
It's not always easy to be living in this world of pain.
You're gonna be crashing into stone walls again and again.
It's alright, it's alright.”

Billy Joel (1949) American singer-songwriter and pianist

You're Only Human (Second Wind).
Song lyrics, Greatest Hits - Volume I & Volume II (1985)

“The fact of the religious vision, and its history of persistent expansion, is our one ground for optimism. Apart from it, human life is a flash of occasional enjoyments lighting up a mass of pain and misery, a bagatelle of transient experience.”

Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) English mathematician and philosopher

1920s, Science and the Modern World (1925)

“I began … to watch with peculiar alarm lest what I called my philosophic estimate of the human lot in general, should be a mere prose lyric expressing my own pain and consequent bad temper.”

George Eliot book Impressions of Theophrastus Such

Part 1
Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879)

“We do too little feel each others' pain;
We do relax too much the social chain
That binds us to each other; slight the care
There is for grief in which we have no share.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The Golden Violet - The Rose
The Golden Violet (1827)

“I wish I was dead,
And lay deep in the grave.
I've a pain in my head,
I wish I was dead.
In a coffin of lead—
With the Wise and the Brave—
I wish I was dead,
And lay deep in the grave.”

Maurice Baring (1874–1945) English writer

"Jean Francois", from Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches.

“The changing of His blessed Countenance changed mine, and I was as glad and merry as it was possible. Then brought our Lord merrily to my mind: Where is now any point of the pain, or of thy grief? And I was full merry.”

Julian of Norwich (1342–1416) English theologian and anchoress

The Eighth Revelation, Chapter 21

“The scholar and the world! The endless strife,
The discord in the harmonies of life!
The love of learning, the sequestered nooks,
And all the sweet serenity of books;
The market-place, the eager love of gain,
Whose aim is vanity, and whose end is pain!”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) American poet

St. 23. <br class="br"> Morituri Salutamus http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/longfellow/19229 (1875)

“The person who grieves, suffers his passion to grow upon him; he indulges it, he loves it; but this never happens in the case of actual pain, which no man ever willingly endured for any considerable time.”

Edmund Burke book A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful

Part I Section V
A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757)

“He thought the world's heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world's pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.”

Cormac McCarthy book All the Pretty Horses

All the Pretty Horses (1992)
Context: He remembered Alejandra and the sadness he'd first seen in the slope of her shoulders which he'd presumed to understand and of which he knew nothing and he felt a loneliness he'd not known since he was a child and he felt wholly alien to the world although he loved it still. He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought the world's heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world's pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.

“In the past they (pain and revenge) helped me a lot, but now I prefer love to inspire me. All that arises from fear and grudge can perhaps make me more interesting but it is not what I want.”

Vincent Gallo (1961) American film director, writer, model, actor and musician

GIOIA Magazine Interview

“Rejoice, oh! grieving heart,
The hours fly past;
With each some sorrow dies,
With each some shadow flies,
Until at last
The red dawn in the east
Bids weary night depart,
And pain is past.”

Adelaide Anne Procter (1825–1864) English poet and songwriter

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 309.

“Under Mirabeau Bridge flows the Seine.
Why must I be reminded again
Of our love?
Doesn't happiness issue from pain?
Bring on the night, ring out the hour.
The days wear on but I endure.”

Guillaume Apollinaire book Alcools

Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine
Et nos amours
Faut-il qu'il m'en souvienne
La joie venait toujours après la peine
Vienne la nuit sonne l'heure
Les jours s'en vont je demeure
"Le Pont Mirabeau" (Mirabeau Bridge), line 1; translation by William Meredith, from Francis Steegmuller Apollinaire: Poet Among the Painters (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973) p. 193.
Alcools (1912)

“Friendship: A true friend will always listen to you patiently, assist you readily, stand with you boldly, advise you wisely, heal your wounds tenderly, and help you transform your pain effectively.”

Thich Nhat Tu (1969) Vietnamese philosopher

Engaged Buddhism, Social Change and World Peace (2014)

“Earth grates on my nerves. It gives me a big pain these days. That’s why I live out here. Earth is overcrowded, bureaucratic, unhealthy, and suffering from too many mass-psychoses to bother classifying.”

Roger Zelazny Isle of the Dead

Source: Isle of the Dead (1969), Chapter 3 (p. 61)

“And when she was finished they laid her in earth
Flowers growing, butterflies juggling over her…
She, so light, barely pressed the earth down
How much pain it took to make her as light as that!”

Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) German poet, playwright, theatre director

"To my mother" [Meiner Mutter] (May 1920), trans. John Willett in Poems, 1913-1956, p. 49
Poems, 1913-1956 (1976)