quotations about suffering
All suffering contorts the countenance so woefully that the pain flies to the beholder likewise.
JAMES VILA BLAKE
Essays
You have to suffer in order to be a human being who can help people understand suffering.
NICHOLSON BAKER
The Anthologist
Those who have experienced traumatic events speak about their profound realizations of the importance of kindness, the power of love and their appreciation for what remains. It appears that this level of insight often comes from suffering.
DANA LIGHTMAN
Power Optimism
To rest in your own suffering
Is evasion of suffering. We must learn to suffer more.
T. S. ELIOT
The Family Reunion
Your suffering is something you choose. Experience it fully. Without it you will not achieve personal growth and higher consciousness.
ERNIE J. ZELINSKI
The Lazy Person's Guide to Happiness
The best fruit loads the broken bough;
And in the wounds our sufferings plow,
Immortal love sows sovereign seed.
GERALD MASSEY
"The Ballad of Babe Christabel"
Extreme hopes are born of extreme misery.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
Unpopular Essays
Difficulty shows what men are. Therefore when a difficulty falls upon you, remember that God, like a trainer of wrestlers, has matched you with a rough young man. Why? So that you may become an Olympic conqueror; but it is not accomplished without sweat.
EPICTETUS
Discourses
Troubles come to us like mire and filth; but, when mingled with the soil, they change to flower and fruit.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
As one grows weaker one is less susceptible to suffering. There is less hurt because there is less to hurt.
JACK LONDON
The Star Rover
Perhaps it is only human nature to inflict suffering on anything that will endure suffering, whether by reason of its genuine humility, or indifference, or sheer helplessness.
HONORE DE BALZAC
Père Goriot
Sick system built on suffering
Sick system built on pain
It's a bullet in the head
Of every happy boy and girl
NASUM
"Sick System"
Affliction is a spiritual physic for the soul, and is compared to a furnace, for as gold is tried and purified therein, so men are proved and either purified from their dross, and fitted for good uses, or else entirely burnt up and undone forever.
WELLINS CALCOTT
Thoughts Moral and Divine
I am one of those whom suffering has made empty and frivolous: each night in my dreams I pull the scab off a wound; each day, vacuous and habit-ridden, I help it re-form.
CYRIL CONNOLLY
The Unquiet Grave
The public's spirit of solidarity in face of suffering is heartening and reminds us of our common humanity.
DIPTI PARDESHI
"Refugee Week: British solidarity in the face of suffering", The London Economic, June 25, 2017
The role of the human brain was to rationalize suffering.
MAILE MELOY
"The Proxy Marriage", The New Yorker, May 21, 2012
Suffering is the crucible where real faith is born.
RAM DASS
One-Liners: A Mini-Manual for a Spiritual Life
Suffering is part of our training program for becoming wise.
RAM DASS
One-Liners: A Mini-Manual for a Spiritual Life
In some mysterious way, once one has gained an insight into human nature, that insight grows from day to day, and he to whom it has given to experience vicariously even one single form of earthly suffering acquires, by reason of this tragic lesson, an understanding of all its forms, even those most foreign to him, and apparently abnormal.
STEFAN ZWEIG
Beware of Pity
Pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional.
AMERICAN PROVERB