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The Book of Secrets: Unlocking the Hidden Dimensions of Your Life (2004)
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985)
Context: What causes us the most misery and pain... has nothing to do with the sort of information made accessible by computers. The computer and its information cannot answer any of the fundamental questions we need to address to make our lives more meaningful and humane. The computer cannot provide an organizing moral framework. It cannot tell us what questions are worth asking. It cannot provide a means of understanding why we are here or why we fight each other or why decency eludes us so often, especially when we need it the most. The computer is... a magnificent toy that distracts us from facing what we most need to confront — spiritual emptiness, knowledge of ourselves, usable conceptions of the past and future.
The Saviors of God (1923)
Context: Pain is not the only essence of our God, nor is hope in a future life or a life on this earth, neither joy nor victory. Every religion that holds up to worship one of these primordial aspects of God narrows our hearts and our minds.
The essence of our God is STRUGGLE. Pain, joy, and hope unfold and labor within this struggle, world without end.
My Day (1935–1962)
Context: It takes courage to love, but pain through love is the purifying fire which those who love generously know. We all know people who are so much afraid of pain that they shut themselves up like clams in a shell and, giving out nothing, receive nothing and therefore shrink until life is a mere living death. (1 April 1939)
Golden Sayings of Epictetus
Context: A Philosopher's school is a Surgery: pain, not pleasure, you should have felt therein. For on entering none of you is whole. One has a shoulder out of joint, another an abscess: a third suffers from an issue, a forth pains in the head. And am I then to sit down and treat you to pretty sentiments and empty fluourishes, so that you may applaud me and depart, with neither shoulder, nor head, nor issue, nor abscess a whit the better for your visit? Is it then for this that young men are to quit their homes, and leave parents, friends, kinsmen and substance to mouth out Bravo to your empty phrases! (121).
“It may be yet the Gods will have me glad!
Yet, Love, I would that thee and pain I had!”
"The Death of Paris".
The Earthly Paradise (1868-70)
Context: Forgetfulness of grief I yet may gain;
In some wise may come ending to my pain;
It may be yet the Gods will have me glad!
Yet, Love, I would that thee and pain I had!
The Philosophy of Paine (1925)
Context: Many a person who could not comprehend Rousseau, and would be puzzled by Montesquieu, could understand Paine as an open book. He wrote with a clarity, a sharpness of outline and exactness of speech that even a schoolboy should be able to grasp. There is nothing false, little that is subtle, and an impressive lack of the negative in Paine. He literally cried to his reader for a comprehending hour, and then filled that hour with such sagacious reasoning as we find surpassed nowhere else in American letters — seldom in any school of writing.
"Philomela" (1853), st. 3
To Mary Boyle, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
Variant translation: "...the search for truth strains the patience of most people, who would rather believe the first things that come to hand." Translation by Paul Woodruff.
Book I, 1.20-[3]
History of the Peloponnesian War, Book I
Hymn 66, Hymns and Spiritual Songs, Book II.
Attributed from postum publications, Hymns and Spiritual Songs (1773)
TV Series and Specials (Includes DVDs), Mind Control (1999–2000) or Inside Your Mind on DVD
Valmiki to Brahma who appeared before him. p. 5.
Ramayana
“I hurt myself today
To see if I still feel.
I focus on the pain,
the only thing that's real.”
Hurt, from The Downward Spiral (1994).
Song lyrics
“If you want to know what love is, have a child. If you want to know what pain is, bury him.”
Yo-Yo Boing! (Spanglish novel, 1998)
Il y a beaucoup d'hommes dont le cœur est puissamment ému par la seule apparence de la souffrance chez une femme: pour eux la douleur semble être une promesse de constance ou d'amour.
Source: A Woman of Thirty (1842), Ch. I: Early Mistakes.