Suffering Quotes

1. "Bound for your distant home"Bound for your distant homeyou were leaving alien lands.In an hour as sad as I've knownI wept over your hands.My hands were numb and cold,still trying to restrainyou, whom my hurt toldnever to end this pain.But you snatched your lips awayfrom our bitterest kiss.You invoked another placethan the dismal exile of this.You said, ‘When we meet again,in the shadow of olive-trees,we shall kiss, in a love without pain,under cloudless infinities.'But there, alas, where the skyshines with blue radiance,where olive-tree shadows lieon the waters glittering dance,your beauty, your suffering,are lost in eternity.But the sweet kiss of our meeting ......I wait for it: you owe it me ......."
Author: Alexander Pushkin

2. "I hate people who splash their own pain on covers, like the whole world should hear about them. Why are we all supposed to be interested in one individual's suffering?"
Author: Andrea Corr

3. "People, he thought, were as hungry for a sight of joy as he had always been--for a moment's relief from that gray load of suffering which seemed so inexplicable and unnecessary. He had never been able to understand why men should be unhappy."
Author: Ayn Rand

4. "Compassion is a wonderful thing. It's what one feels when one looks at a squashed caterpillar. An elevating experience. One can let oneself go and spread--you know, like taking a girdle off. You don't have to hold your stomach, your heart or your spirit up--when you feel compassion. All you have to do is look down. It's much easier. When you look up, you get a pain in the neck. Compassion is the greatest virtue. It justifies suffering. There's got to be suffering in the world, else how would we be virtuous and feel compassion?... Oh, it has an antithesis--but such a hard, demanding one... Admiration, Mrs. Jones, admiration. But that takes more than a girdle... So I say that anyone for whom we can't feel sorry is a vicious person. Like Howard Roark."
Author: Ayn Rand

5. "Harness the imagination: Sometimes curbing her, sometimes giving her rein, for she is the whole of happiness. She sets to rights even the understanding. She sinks to tyranny, not satisfied with mere faith, but demanding works. Thus she becomes the mistress of life itself. She does so with pleasure or with pain, according to the nonsense presented. She makes people contented or discontented with themselves. By dangling before some nothing but the specter of their eternal suffering, she becomes the scourge of these fools. To others she shows nothing but fortune and romance, while merrily laughing. Of all this she is capable if not held in check by the wisest of wills."
Author: Baltasar Gracián

6. "When someone is suffering, there is a deep, visceral reaction in the core of our being, a flood of empathy and a frightfully desperate compulsion to give aid."
Author: Bryant McGill

7. "It dawns on you one day... how precious your life is and how not okay it is for anyone, ever, to cause you any amount of suffering, ever. Then the next time you step out the door you look at everyone and you're thinking, "My life is precious and you're not allowed to hurt me."
Author: C. JoyBell C.

8. "Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam."
Author: Carl Sagan

9. "Love and self-denial for the object loved go hand-in-hand. If I profess to love a certain person, and yet will neither give my silver nor my gold to relieve his wants, nor in any way deny myself comfort or ease for his sake, such love is contemptible; it wears the name, but lacks the reality of love: true love must be measured by the degree to which the person loving will be willing to subject himself to crosses and losses, to suffering and self-denials. After all, the value of a thing in the market is what a man will give for it, and you must estimate the value of a man's love by that which he is willing to give up for it."
Author: Charles H. Spurgeon

10. "You care about the deficit because it allows you to do things you need to do to help people who are suffering."
Author: Christina Romer

11. "Maybe a certain degree of deprivation was necessary to the experience of pleasure, just as suffering was an integral part of joy."
Author: Claire Holden Rothman

12. "Towns are suffering from all these things, we should unite until we are all satisfied, man cannot be killing each other as if we were animals, as if we had no culture; that is a lack of culture."
Author: Compay Segundo

13. "Forget the sufferingYou caused others.Forget the sufferingOthers caused you.The waters run and run,Springs sparkle and are done,You walk the earth you are forgetting.Sometimes you hear a distant refrain.What does it mean, you ask, who is singing?A childlike sun grows warm.A grandson and a great-grandson are born.You are led by the hand once again.The names of the rivers remain with you.How endless those rivers seem!Your fields lie fallow,The city towers are not as they were.You stand at the threshold mute."
Author: Czeslaw Milosz

14. "That alone would be Eddie's triumph in all this; that she had taught the kelpie suffering."
Author: D. Morgenstern

15. "War," Beranabus murmurs, face crinkling. "Most humans know nothing of true warfare. They wage their silly territorial battles, kill each other ruthlessly and freely, and consider themselves experts on war and suffering. But the real war has always been ahead of them, unseen, unimagined. Enemies who can't be killed by normal weapons, who have their base in an alternate universe, who are interested only in slaughtering every living being on the face of the planet."
Author: Darren Shan

16. "Why shouldn't the death of a person you love bring you into lurid ruin? You don't know how to love the one you love until they disappear abruptly. Then you understand how thinly distanced from their suffering, how sparing of self you often were, only rarely unguarded of heart, working your networks of give-and-take."
Author: Don DeLillo

17. "Lucy was suffering from the most grievous wrong which this world has yet discovered: diplomatic advantage had been taken of her sincerity, of her craving for sympathy and love. Such a wrong is not easily forgotten. Never again did she expose herself without due consideration and precaution against rebuff. And such a wrong may react disastrously upon the soul."
Author: E.M. Forster

18. "Suffering makes you live time in detail, moment after moment. Which is to say that it exists for you: over the others, the ones who don't suffer, time flows, so that they don't live in time, in fact they never have."
Author: Emil Cioran

19. "Do not look forward to what may happen tomorrow; the same everlasting Father who cares for you today will take care of you tomorrow and every day. Either He will shield you from suffering, or He will give you unfailing strength to bear it."
Author: Francis De Sales

20. "If you are unwilling to endure your own suffering even for an hour, and ontinually forestall all possible misfortune, if you regard as deserving of annihilation, any suffering and pain generally as evil, as detestable, and as blots on existence, well, you have then, besides your religion of compassion, yet another religion in your heart (and this is perhaps the mother of the former)-the religion of smug ease. Ah, how little you know of the happiness of man, you comfortable and good-natured ones!for happiness and misfortune are brother and sister, and twins, who grow tall together, or, as with you, remain small together!"
Author: Friedrich Nietzsche

21. "I am scared of one thing in my life, to be unworthy of my sufferings."
Author: Fyodor Dostoyevsky

22. "Worldliness proposes objectives which demand no radical breach with man's fallen nature; it judges the importance of things by the present and material results; it weighs success by numbers; it covets human esteem and wants no unpopularity; it knows no truth for which it is worth suffering; it declines to be a 'fool for Christ's sake."
Author: Iain Murray

23. "Barabas placed a stack on the table and held the chair out for me. "For you." "I'm hungry and I don't have time for this." Barabas's eyes held no mercy. "Make time, Alpha. You have two hands. You can eat and sign simultaneously." Curran grinned. "Enjoying my suffering?" I asked. "I find it hilarious that you'll run into a gunfight with nothing but your sword, but paperwork makes you panic." Barabas put a thicker stack in front of him. "This is yours, m'lord." Curran swore."
Author: Ilona Andrews

24. "Christ and His angels and His prophets forever labor to buoy up our spirits, steady our nerves, calm our hearts, send us forth with renewed strength and resolute hope. They wish all to know that "if God be for us, who can be against us?"7 In the world we shall have tribulation, but we are to be of good cheer. Christ has overcome the world.8 Through His suffering and His obedience He has earned and rightly bears the crown of "Prince of Peace.", Nov. 1996"
Author: Jeffrey R. Holland

25. "God became man that dehumanized men might become true men. We become true men in the community of the incarnate, the suffering and loving, the human God."
Author: Jürgen Moltmann

26. "War was so many things, and not the least of which confusion. What was wrong? What was right, for that matter?Was killing right or wrong? Brave or cowardly? Human nature or unnatural behavior of creatures too smart for their own good?Loyalty, betrayal, hate, love, fear, friendship, teamwork, violence. War was connected to all of these. Hard work, sadness, suffering, discipline, chaos, questions, few answers, strategy, bravery, foolishness, death, life.And both winning and losing were only two small aspects of the word war."
Author: Kenzie Kovacs Szabo

27. "Oh, we're very careful, Marilla. And it's so interesting. Two flashes means, "Are you there?" Three means "yes" and four "no." Five means, "Come over as soon as possible, because I have something important to reveal." Diana has just signalled five flashes, and I'm really suffering to know what it is."
Author: L.M. Montgomery

28. "It's about not taking things personally. Even when you feel the world is crumbling around you. It's about choosing happiness over suffering. It's about retraining the way we think."
Author: Laura Munson

29. "Whenever evil befalls us, we ought to ask ourselves, after the first suffering, how we can turn it into good. So shall we take occasion, from one bitter root, to raise perhaps many flowers"
Author: Leigh Hunt

30. "They say: sufferings are misfortunes," said Pierre. 'But if at once this minute, I was asked, would I remain what I was before I was taken prisoner, or go through it all again, I should say, for God's sake let me rather be a prisoner and erat horseflesh again. We imagine that as soon as we are torn out of our habitual path all is over, but it is only the beginning of something new and good. As long as there is life, there is happiness. There is a great deal, a great deal before us."
Author: Leo Tolstoy

31. "Our arguments - and those of hundreds more Venezuelans suffering the same injustice - are clear and forceful: political disqualification violates laws in Venezuela and throughout the continent."
Author: Leopoldo Lopez

32. "Then it was that Jo, living in the darkened room, with that suffering little sister always before her eyes and that pathetic voice sounding in her ears, learned to see the beauty and the sweetness of Beth's nature, to feel how deep and tender a place she filled in all hearts, and to acknowledge the worth of Beth's unselfish ambition to live for others, and make home happy by that exercise of those simple virtues which all may possess, and which all should love and value more than talent, wealth, or beauty."
Author: Louisa May Alcott

33. "And, quite possibly, this lack (or seeming lack) of participation by a person's soul in the virtue of which he or she is the agent has, apart from its aesthetic meaning, a reality which, if not strictly psychological, may at least be called psysiognomical. Since then, whenever in the course of my life I have come across, in convents for instance, truly saintly embodiments of practical charity, they have generally had the cheerful, practical, brusque and unemotioned air of a busy surgeon, the sort of face in which one can discern no commiseration, no tenderness at the sight of suffering humanity, no fear of hurting it, the impassive, unsympathetic, sublime face of true goodness."
Author: Marcel Proust

34. "Probably most dying patients, even when suffering greatly, would choose to live as long as possible. That courage and grace should be protected and honored, and we should put every effort into treating their symptoms."
Author: Marcia Angell

35. "First, I have culled evidence that physical death is not the end of the road for any of us. I know this message is critical because I've seen people consumed by fear of death or suffering unbearable grief after losing a loved one. Some can draw into a shell, ceasing all efforts to reach their potential, or even give up on life."
Author: Mark Ireland

36. "Solomon, who was one of the Deity's favorites, had a copulation cabinet composed of seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines. To save his life he could not have kept two of these young creatures satisfactorily refreshed, even if he had fifteen experts to help him. Necessarily almost the entire thousand had to go hungry for years and years on a stretch. Conceive of a man hardhearted enough to look daily upon all that suffering and not be moved to mitigate it."
Author: Mark Twain

37. "When the preponderance of human beings choose to act with justice and generosity and kindness, then learning and love and decency prevail. When the preponderance of human beings choose power, greed, and indifference to suffering, the world is filled with war, poverty, and cruelty."
Author: Mary Doria Russell

38. "The common man wants nothing of life but health, longevity, amusement, comfort -- "happiness." He who does not despise this should turn his eyes from world history, for it contains nothing of the sort. The best that history has created is great suffering."
Author: Oswald Spengler

39. "... the Istiqlal was powerful, which did not at all coincide with his conception of it, nor with the picture the organization painted of itself: a purely defensive group of selfless martyrs who were willing to brave the brutality of the French in order to bring hope to their suffering countrymen."
Author: Paul Bowles

40. "Human beings can withstand a week without water, two weeks without food, many years of homelessness, but not loneliness. It is the worst of all tortures, the worst of all sufferings."
Author: Paulo Coelho

41. "The State which would provide everything, absorbing everything into itself, would ultimately become a mere bureaucracy incapable of guaranteeing the very thing which the suffering person—every person—needs: namely, loving personal concern. We do not need a State which regulates and controls everything, but a State which, in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity, generously acknowledges and supports initiatives arising from the different social forces and combines spontaneity with closeness to those in need. The Church is one of those living forces."
Author: Pope Benedict XVI

42. "A king is a man strong of character and conviction who leads by example and truly cares for the suffering of his people,not a brute who rules simply because he is the strongest."
Author: R.A. Salvatore

43. "Love, not anger, brought Jesus to the cross. Golgotha came as a result of God's great desire to forgive, not his reluctance. Jesus knew that by his vicarious suffering he could actually absorb all the evil of humanity and so heal it, forgive it, redeem it."
Author: Richard J. Foster

44. "Judgment, then, is not an impersonal, legalistic process. It is a matter of love, and it is something we choose for ourselves. Nor is punishment a vindictive act. God's "curses" are not expressions of hatred, but of fatherly love and discipline. Like medicinal ointment, they hurt in order to heal. They impose suffering that is remedial, restorative, and redemptive. God's wrath is an expression of His love for His wayward children."
Author: Scott Hahn

45. "Dying is so simple. A fleeting moment of suffering. In the blink of an eye you are over the threshold, into another world. No more pain, no more fears. You sleep so well there.Dying is like rubbing snow together, setting fire to a whole winter of cold and ice."
Author: Shan Sa

46. "She imagined the reading she did now as like climbing inside one of those deep old beds she'd seen in a museum, with a sliding door to close behind you: even as she was suffering with a book and could hardly bear it, felt as if her heart would crack with emotion or with outrage at injustice, the act of reading it enclosed and saved her. Sometimes when she moved back out of the book and into her own life, just for a moment she could see her circumstances with a new interest and clarity, as if they were happening to someone else. (She's the one, 155)"
Author: Tessa Hadley

47. "Human life is fragile: we live in the space between one breath and the next. We often try to maintain an illusion of permanence, through what we do, say, wear, buy, and how we enjoy ourselves and who and how we love. Yet it is an illusion that is constantly being undermined by change and death. We can use diamonds in whatever way we like. They are empty things, pretty as water, yet within them—if we want to see it—there is blood, dust, love, curses, and suffering. There is desire to make someone happy, there is admiration, there is ostentation…and there is a company's profit curve."
Author: Victoria Finlay

48. "Not every conflict is necessarily neurotic; some amount of conflict is normal and healthy. In a similar sense suffering is not always a pathological phenomenon; rather than being a symptom of neurosis, suffering may well be a human achievement, especially if the suffering grows out of existential frustration... Existential frustration is neither pathological or pathogenic."
Author: Viktor E. Frankl

49. "Crime, violence, infamy are not tragedy. Tragedy occurs when a human soul awakes and seeks, in suffering and pain, to free itself from crime, violence, infamy, even at the cost of life. The struggle is the tragedy - not defeat or death. That is why the spectacle of tragedy has always filled men, not with despair, but with a sense of hope and exaltation."
Author: Whittaker Chambers

50. "Something in the heart of most human beings simply cannot abide pain inflicted on the innocent, especially children. Even broken men serving in the worst correctional facilities will often first take out their own rage on those who have caused suffering to children. Even in such a world of relative morality, causing harm to a child is still considered absolutely wrong. Period!"
Author: Wm. Paul Young

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