Stronger than pain quotes (page 19) | Quotes of famous people

“The tree is happy because it is scarcely sentient;
the hard rock is happier still, it feels nothing:
there is no pain as great as being alive,
no burden heavier than that of conscious life.”

Rubén Darío (1867–1916) Nicaraguan poet and writer

Fatalidad (Fatality).
Los Cisnes y Otros Poemas (The Swans and Other Poems) (1905)

“I numbered years of pain and distress,
And but fourteen days of happiness.
Mortal, nor pleasure, nor wealth, nor power,
Are more than the toys of a passing hour;”

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

The Golden Violet - The Eastern King
The Golden Violet (1827)

“Give us back our suffering, we cry to Heaven in our hearts — suffering rather than indifferentism; for out of nothing comes nothing. But out of suffering may come the cure. Better have pain than paralysis!”

Florence Nightingale (1820–1910) English social reformer and statistician, and the founder of modern nursing

Cassandra (1860)
Context: Give us back our suffering, we cry to Heaven in our hearts — suffering rather than indifferentism; for out of nothing comes nothing. But out of suffering may come the cure. Better have pain than paralysis! A hundred struggle and drown in the breakers. One discovers the new world. But rather, ten times rather, die in the surf, heralding the way to that new world, than stand idly on the shore!

“One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea.”

Walter Bagehot (1826–1877) British journalist, businessman, and essayist

Source: Physics and Politics https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4350 (1869), Ch. 5, The Age of Discussion

“The truth is always in the minority, and the minority is always stronger than the majority, because as a rule the minority is made up of those who actually have an opinion, while the strength of the majority is illusory, formed of that crowd which has no opinion — and which therefore the next moment (when it becomes clear that the minority is the stronger) adopts the latter's opinion, which now is in the majority, i. e. becomes rubbish by having the whole retinue and numerousness on its side, while the truth is again in a new minority.”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

1850
1850s, The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard, 1850s

“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.”

James Frey My Friend Leonard

Source: My Friend Leonard

“The power of women! I've never felt so full of mysterious power. Men are a joke.
We're so weak physically, so helpless with things. Still, even today. But we're stronger than they are. We can stand their cruelty. They can't stand ours.”

John Fowles book The Collector

Source: The Collector

“Remember that Children and Fools want every thing because they want Wit to distinguish: and therefore there is no stronger Evidence of a Crazy Understanding, than the making too large a Catalogue of things necessary, when in truth there are so very few things that have a right to be placed in it.”

George Savile, 1st Marquess of Halifax (1633–1695) English politician

The Lady's New Year's Gift: or Advice to a Daughter (1688)

“Unhappy events abroad have retaught us two simple truths about the liberty of a democratic people. The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic State itself.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945) 32nd President of the United States

Simple Truths message to Congress http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article12058.htm (April 29, 1938). http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=15637 http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,759590,00.html
1930s
Context: Unhappy events abroad have retaught us two simple truths about the liberty of a democratic people. The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic State itself. That, in its essence, is fascism — ownership of government by an individual, by a group or by any other controlling private power.
The second truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if its business system does not provide employment and produce and distribute goods in such a way as to sustain an acceptable standard of living. Both lessons hit home. Among us today a concentration of private power without equal in history is growing.

“The influence of Meister Eckhart is stronger today than it has been in hundreds of years. Eckhart met the problems of contingency and omnipotence, creator-and-creature-from-nothing by making God the only reality and the presence or imprint of God upon nothing, the source of reality in the creature.”

Kenneth Rexroth (1905–1982) American poet, writer, anarchist, academic and conscientious objector

"Eckhart, Brethren of the Free Spirit," from Communalism: From Its Origins to the Twentieth Century (1974), ch. 4
Context: The influence of Meister Eckhart is stronger today than it has been in hundreds of years. Eckhart met the problems of contingency and omnipotence, creator-and-creature-from-nothing by making God the only reality and the presence or imprint of God upon nothing, the source of reality in the creature. Reality in other words was a hierarchically structured participation of the creature in the creator. From the point of view of the creature this process could be reversed. If creatureliness is real, God becomes the Divine Nothing. God is not, as in scholasticism, the final subject of all predicates. He is being as unpredicable. The existence of the creature, in so far as it exists, is the existence of God, and the creature’s experience of God is therefore in the final analysis equally unpredicable. Neither can even be described; both can only be indicated. We can only point at reality, our own or God’s. The soul comes to the realization of God by knowledge, not as in the older Christian mysticism by love. Love is the garment of knowledge. The soul first trains itself by systematic unknowing until at last it confronts the only reality, the only knowledge, God manifest in itself. The soul can say nothing about this experience in the sense of defining it. It can only reveal it to others.

“The depressed person was in terrible and unceasing pain, and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror.”

David Foster Wallace book Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

Source: Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

“It is true that there are men who, on the approach of severe pain, hear the very opposite call of command, and never appear more proud, more martial, or more happy than when the storm is brewing; indeed, pain itself provides them with their supreme moments! These are the heroic men, the great pain-bringers of mankind: those few and rare ones who need just the same apology as pain generally — and verily, it should not be denied them. They are forces of the greatest importance for preserving and advancing the species, be it only because they are opposed to smug ease, and do not conceal their disgust at this kind of happiness.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

Sec. 318
The Gay Science (1882)

“The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.”

Kurt Vonnegut (1922–2007) American writer

Paragraph 1 (p. 7 of Welcome to the Monkey House)
Welcome to the Monkey House (1968), "Harrison Bergeron" (1961)

“I'm Irish!… When I feel well I feel better than anyone, when I am in pain I yell at the top of my lungs, and when I am dead I shall be deader than anybody.”

Morgan Llywelyn (1937) Irish writer

“Daniel my brother you are older than me.
Do you still feel the pain of the scars that won't heal?
Your eyes have died but you see more than I.
Daniel you're a star in the face of the sky.”

Elton John (1947) English rock singer-songwriter, composer and pianist

Daniel
Song lyrics, Don't Shoot Me I'm Only the Piano Player (1973)

“He had carefully avoided her out of the natural cowardice that characterizes the stronger sex.”

Gustave Flaubert Madame Bovary

Source: Madame Bovary

“Weapons, when they break and are mended, can be stronger at the mended places. Perhaps hearts are the same.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Heavenly Fire

Jace Herondale, to Zachariah, pg. 236
Source: The Mortal Instruments, City of Heavenly Fire (2014)

“Temper us in fire, and we grow stronger. When we suffer, we survive.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Heavenly Fire

Source: City of Heavenly Fire

“I believe that Britain will be safer, stronger and better off by remaining in a reformed European Union”

David Cameron (1966) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Quoted on Yle.Fi (February 20, 2016), "Finland responds positively to Britain's EU deal" http://yle.fi/uutiset/finland_responds_positively_to_britains_eu_deal/8688531
2010s, 2016

“The twigs will be tied together in a neater and stronger bundle if they are all the same size and length. That’s fascism.”

Alan Moore (1953) English writer primarily known for his work in comic books

De Abaitua interview (1998)
Context: The twigs will be tied together in a neater and stronger bundle if they are all the same size and length. That’s fascism. It suggests that you have two contrary organisational principles involved … One is a kind of linear, meccano-like organisation – tie up all the sticks, make sure they are the same length, and you have a brick wall or something. The other one – anarchy – is a more fractal more natural more human organisational system in that it organises society in much the same way that we organise our personalities. Where it is purely the interplay of neurons – we haven’t got a king neuron that tells all the other neurons what to do. It seems to me to be a more emotionally natural way of working with other people.

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