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“Experience is not what happens to you. It is what you do with what happens to you. Don’t waste your pain; use it to help others.”

Rick Warren (1954) Christian religious leader

Source: The Purpose Driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here for?

“She had never experienced the pain of unsatisfied desire before. It hurt. It hurt like nothing she'd ever felt, and there seemed to be no remedy.”

Lisa Kleypas book Dreaming of You

Source: Dreaming of You

“When you feel someone else's pain and joy as powerfully as if it were your own, then you know you really loved them.”

Ann Brashares book Girls in Pants: The Third Summer of the Sisterhood

Variant: Live, laugh, love.

When you can feel someone else's pain and joy as if it's your own, thats when you know you really love them - Tina Lowell
Source: Girls in Pants: The Third Summer of the Sisterhood

“There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain.”

James Baldwin book Giovanni's Room

Source: Giovanni's Room

“At such a moment, it is not the physical pain which hurts the most (and this applies to adults as much as to punished children); it is the mental agony caused by the injustice, the unreasonableness of it all.”

Viktor E. Frankl book Man's Search for Meaning

Source: Man's Search for Meaning

“My old tutor used to say that the hearts of Nephilim were like the hearts of angels: They felt every human pain, and never healed”

Cassandra Clare book City of Heavenly Fire

Source: City of Heavenly Fire

“Language has created the word “loneliness” to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word “solitude” to express the glory of being alone.”

Paul Tillich (1886–1965) German-American theologian and philosopher

Source: The Eternal Now

“From bitter searching of the heart,
quickened with passion and with pain
we rise
to play a greater part
this is the faith from which we start.”

Leonard Cohen (1934–2016) Canadian poet and singer-songwriter

“Some people have a thick skin and you don't. Your heart is really open and that is going to cause pain, but that is an appropriate response to this world.”

Anne Lamott (1954) Novelist, essayist, memoirist, activist

Source: Stitches: A Handbook on Meaning, Hope, and Repair

“I am absolutely convinced that meaninglessness does not come form being weary of pain; meaninglessness comes from being weary of pleasure.”

Ravi Zacharias (1946) Indian philosopher

Source: Can Man Live Without God

“Those who have hurt you in the past cannot continue to hurt you now unless you hold on to the pain through resentment.”

Rick Warren (1954) Christian religious leader

Source: The Purpose Driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here for?

“Let me not pray to be sheltered from dangers,
but to be fearless in facing them.

Let me not beg for the stilling of my pain, but
for the heart to conquer it.”

Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) Bengali polymath

Source: Collected Poems and Plays of Rabindranath Tagore

“The heart may freeze, or it can burn. The pain will ease and I can learn. There is no future, there is no past. I live this moment as, my last.”

Jonathan Larson (1960–1996) American composer and playwright

Source: Rent: The Complete Book and Lyrics of the Broadway Musical

“… the painful intensity of my sensations, even when they're happy ones; the blissful intensity of my sensations, even when they're sad.”

Fernando Pessoa book The Book of Disquiet

Source: The Book of Disquiet

“Her mind lives tidily, apart from cold and noise and pain. And bolts the door against her heart, out wailing in the rain.”

Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) American poet, short story writer, critic and satirist

“If I had a shiny gun
I could have a world of fun
Speeding bullets through the brains
Of the folks that cause me pains :)”

Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) American poet, short story writer, critic and satirist

“If it is very painful for you to criticize your friends, you are safe in doing it. But if you take the slightest pleasure in it, that is the time to hold your tongue”

Alice Miller (1923–2010) Swiss psychologist

“I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.”

James Baldwin book The Fire Next Time

"Me and My House" in Harper's (November 1955); republished in Notes of a Native Son (1955)
Source: The Fire Next Time

“Some secrets, she thought, were better told; some were better left the burden of the carrier, that they might not cause pain to others.”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Princess

Source: Clockwork Princess

“The human mind is often, and I think it is for the most part, in a state neither of pain nor pleasure, which I call a state of indifference.”

Edmund Burke (1729–1797) Anglo-Irish statesman

Source: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful