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“He made me see what Life is, and what Death signifies, and why Love is stronger than both.”
Source: The Canterville Ghost
“Strange how people who suffer together have stronger connections than those who are most content.”
Song lyrics, Knocked Out Loaded (1986), Brownsville Girl (with Sam Shepard)
Are Comics Fascist?, as quoted in The Ages of Wonder Woman: Essays on the Amazon Princess in Changing Times, edited by Joeph J Darowski, p.7 in the essay "William Marston's Feminist Agenda" by Michelle R. Finn, p.14.
Moisés Neto. Nelson Rodrigues: o nosso boca de ouro, p 3.
“There is no pain worse than ignorance and lack of intelligence.”
Ibn Shu’ba al-Harrani, Tuhaf al-'Uqul, p. 165
Dichoso el árbol, que es apenas sensitivo,
y más la piedra dura porque esa ya no siente,
pues no hay dolor más grande que el dolor de ser vivo,
ni mayor pesadumbre que la vida consciente.
Cantos de vida y esperanza (1901), "Lo fatal" ("Fatalism")
Quoted in Chambers Dictionary of Quotations (1997), p. 305.
About Oscar de la Hoya, as quoted in Forbes http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2007/02/20/ap3446524.html (2007).
2000s, 2007
Genius, iv
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part XI - Cash and Credit
"Quotes", Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957), Mythical Phase: Symbol as Archetype
“It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul.”
Source: Darkness Visible (1990), VI
Source: Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness
Context: There is a region in the experience of pain where the certainty of alleviation often permits superhuman endurance. We learn to live with pain in varying degrees daily, or over longer periods of time, and we are more often than not mercifully free of it. When we endure severe discomfort of a physical nature our conditioning has taught us since childhood to make accommodations to the pain’s demands — o accept it, whether pluckily or whimpering and complaining, according to our personal degree of stoicism, but in any case to accept it. Except in intractable terminal pain, there is almost always some form of relief; we look forward to that alleviation, whether it be through sleep or Tylenol or self-hypnosis or a change of posture or, most often, through the body’s capacity for healing itself, and we embrace this eventual respite as the natural reward we receive for having been, temporarily, such good sports and doughty sufferers, such optimistic cheerleaders for life at heart.
In depression this faith in deliverance, in ultimate restoration, is absent. The pain is unrelenting, and what makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no remedy will come — not in a day, an hour, a month, or a minute. If there is mild relief, one knows that it is only temporary; more pain will follow. It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul. So the decision-making of daily life involves not, as in normal affairs, shifting from one annoying situation to another less annoying — or from discomfort to relative comfort, or from boredom to activity — but moving from pain to pain. One does not abandon, even briefly, one's bed of nails, but is attached to it wherever one goes.
“To an active mind, indolence is more painful than labor.”
“Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure.”
Quoted, Tender is the Night (1934)
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part One: Lightness and Weight
Variant: For there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.
Source: Identity
