Stronger than pain quotes (page 153) | Quotes of famous people

“Work with a feeling that, there is none lower than me; There is none greater than society of Sharanas.”

Basava (1134–1196) a 12th-century Hindu philosopher, statesman, Kannada Bhakti poet of Lingayatism

Basavanna's Preachings

“Nothing could be older than the daily news, nothing deader than yesterday's newspaper.”

Edward Abbey (1927–1989) American author and essayist

Source: A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto) (1990), Ch. 11 : Money Et Cetera, p. 100

“It is easier not to speak a word at all than to speak more words than we should.”

Thomas à Kempis book The Imitation of Christ

Book I, ch. 20.
The Imitation of Christ (c. 1418)

“Awe is more than an emotion; it is a way of understanding, insight into a meaning greater than ourselves.”

Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972) Polish-American Conservative Judaism Rabbi

Source: Who Is Man? (1965), Ch. 5
Context: Awe is more than an emotion; it is a way of understanding, insight into a meaning greater than ourselves. The beginning of awe is wonder, and the beginning of wisdom is awe.
Awe is an intuition for the dignity of all things, a realization that things not only are what they are but also stand, however remotely, for something supreme. Awe is a sense for transcendence, for the reference everywhere to mystery beyond all things. It enables us to perceive in the world intimations of the divine, to sense in small things the beginning of infinite significance, to sense the ultimate in the common and the simple: to feel in the rush of the passing the stillness of the eternal. What we cannot comprehend by analysis, we become aware of in awe.

“No nobler feeling than this of admiration for one higher than himself dwells in the breast of man.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Divinity
Context: No nobler feeling than this of admiration for one higher than himself dwells in the breast of man. It is to this hour, and at all hours, the vivifying influence in man's life.

“Personality is more important than beauty, but imagination is more important than both of them.”

Laurette Taylor (1884–1946) American stage and silent film actress

The Quality You Need Most, from Green Book Magazine (April 1914)

“There is no sweeter pleasure than to surprise a man by giving him more than he hopes for.”

Charles Baudelaire book Le Spleen de Paris

Il n'est pas de plaisir plus doux que de surprendre un homme en lui donnant plus qu'il n'espère.
XXVIII: "La Fausse Monnaie" http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Petits_Po%C3%A8mes_en_prose_-_XXVIII._La_Fausse_Monnaie
Le Spleen de Paris (1862)

“The irreligious are more religious than they themselves know, and the religious are less so than they think.”

Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872) austrian dramatic and writer

Die Irreligiösen sind religiöser als sie selbst wissen, und die Religiösen sind's weniger, als sie meinen.
Aphorism (1857), in Studien zur Philosophie und Religion. Historische und politische Studien. Hamburg: Tredition, 2011, p. 32. ISBN 978-3-8424-1558-4.

“It is more necessary for the soul to be cured than the body; for it is better to die than to live badly.”

Epictetus (50–138) philosopher from Ancient Greece

Fragment xxxii.
Golden Sayings of Epictetus, Fragments

“There is always someone out there getting better than you by training harder than you.”

Pelé (1940–2022) Brazilian association football player

“Few campaigns are more dangerous than emotional calls for proscription rather than thought.”

Stephen Jay Gould book An Urchin in the Storm

"Integrity and Mr. Rifkin", p. 238
An Urchin in the Storm (1987)

“Why in this world of ours there should be so much suffering no one knows. But this we know; that, evil existing, the world being such as it is, we can win from evil, if we choose, an inestimable good, namely — the conviction that there is in us a power not of the senses, the conviction that spirit exists, and exists in us.
A sceptic may say that in a world ideally conceivable we might have secured this precious conviction without the necessity of undergoing the ordeal of pain. To which the reply is: that in a world ideally conceivable what he says may be true; but in the world as it is, with which alone we are concerned, we have ample cause for gratitude that we can turn suffering to such far-reaching account, that we can distil from the bitter root this divine elixir; that by manfully bearing the pains of the senses, inexplicable though they be, we are able to gain the certainty that a power not born of the senses exists in us, operates in us. It is this effect of pain that accounts for the serenity and peace of many patient sufferers, a peace and a serenity which surround their bed of misery with a kind of halo.”

Felix Adler (1851–1933) German American professor of political and social ethics, rationalist, and lecturer

Section 7 : Spiritual Progress
Founding Address (1876), Life and Destiny (1913)

“Now, when suffering is always the first of the arguments marshalled against life, as its most questionable feature, it is salutary to remember the times when people made the opposite assessment, because they could not do without making people suffer and saw first-rate magic in it, a veritable seductive lure to life. Perhaps pain - I say this to comfort the squeamish - did not hurt as much then as it does now; at least, a doctor would be justified in assuming this, if he had treated a Negro (taken as a representative for primeval man) for serious internal inflammations which would drive the European with the stoutest constitution to distraction; - they do not do that to Negroes. (The curve of human capacity for pain actually does seem to sink dramatically and almost precipitously beyond the first ten thousand or ten million of the cultural elite; and for myself, I do not doubt that in comparison with one night of pain endured by a single, hysterical blue stocking, the total suffering of all the animals who have been interrogated by the knife in scientific research is as nothing.)”

Friedrich Nietzsche book On the Genealogy of Morality

Essay 2, Section 7
On the Genealogy of Morality (1887)

“I have said that the soul is not more than the body,
And I have said that the body is not more than the soul,
And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one's-self is”

Walt Whitman (1819–1892) American poet, essayist and journalist

“The ridicule is pressure to consider ourselves less important than someone even more precious: A baby is more precious than a mother; a woman is more precious than a man.”

Warren Farrell (1943) author, spokesperson, expert witness, political candidate

Women Can't Hear What Men Don't Say (2000)

“I want her more than diamonds,
I want her more than gold.
I want her more than anything
Anyone could hold.”

Tom Petty (1950–2017) American musician

Built to Last, written with Jeff Lynne
Lyrics, Into The Great Wide Open (1991)

“More excellent than the austere, more excellent even than men of knowledge is the Ascetic deemed; more excellent than workers is the Ascetic; therefore be thou Ascetic, Arjuna.”

W. Douglas P. Hill (1884–1962) British Indologist

Source: The Bhagavadgītā (1973), p. 123–24. (46.)

“Buddhism's starting point is that all living things, we who are so full of pain and sadness, together with all these living things, want to liberate ourselves from this state of pain. … All living things have been repeating transmigration for immeasurable kalpa. … Sometimes a soul perceives itself as a human. At other times it is born in a beast, that is, what we call an animal. … As a result, the living things around us are all our parents and children, brothers and sisters, as they have been for a long time. People of different religions will think this idea too serious and terrifying. [Indeed] this is a serious world to a terrifying degree.”

Kenji Miyazawa (1896–1933) Japanese poet and author of children's literature

The Great Vegetarian Festival (1934); as quoted in Miyazawa Kenji: Selections, edited by Hiroaki Sato (University of California Press, 2007), p. 14 https://books.google.it/books?id=D7IwDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA14.

“Becoming aware of the intense suffering of billions of animals, and of our own participation in that suffering, can bring up painful emotions: sorrow and grief for the animals; anger at the injustice and deception of the system; despair at the enormity of the problem; fear that trusted authorities and institutions are, in fact, untrustworthy; and guilt for having contributed to the problem. Bearing witness means choosing to suffer. Indeed, empathy is literally “feeling with.” Choosing to suffer is particularly difficult in a culture that is addicted to comfort—a culture that teaches that pain should be avoided whenever possible and that ignorance is bliss. We can reduce our resistance to witnessing by valuing authenticity over personal pleasure, and integration over ignorance.”

Melanie Joy book Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows

Source: Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows (2010), pp. 142-143

“Imagine that for hundreds of years your most formative traumas, your daily suffering and pain, the abuse you live through, the terror you live with, are unspeakable — not the basis of literature. You grow up with your father holding you down and covering your mouth so another man can make a horrible searing pain between your legs.… You learn how to leave your body and create someone else who takes over when you cannot stand it any more. You develop a self who is ingratiating and obsequious and imitative and aggressively passive and silent — you learn, in a word, femininity.”

Catharine A. MacKinnon book Only Words

Source: Only Words (1993), pp. 3-7

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