quotations about suffering
Suffering is the crucible where real faith is born.
RAM DASS
One-Liners: A Mini-Manual for a Spiritual Life
You cannot insult a man more atrociously than by refusing to believe he is suffering.
CESARE PAVESE
This Business of Living, October 5, 1938
Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself.
C. S. LEWIS
The Problem of Pain
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
A heart is that which opens
To trouble's thousand ways;
An unseen arrow wounds it,
To halt through all its days.
An evil eye may scatter blight,
A flitting mite may sting;
No wonder that a heartache
Is such a common thing!
CAROLINE SPENCER
"Heartache"
When sufferings become unendurable the cries are no longer heard. The cries, too, fall like rain in summer.
BERTOLT BRECHT
"When Evil-Doing Comes Like Falling Rain"
One does not abandon, even briefly, one's bed of nails, but is attached to it wherever one goes.
WILLIAM STYRON
Darkness Visible
To each his suff'rings: all are men,
Condemn'd alike to groan.
THOMAS GRAY
Odes on a Distant Prospect of Eton College
But when that we speak of suffering, we do not speak of a dull and neglected suffering, but of a wise and industrious suffering, which draweth and contriveth use and advantage out of that which seemeth adverse and contrary; which is that properly which we call accommodating or applying. Now the wisdom of application resteth principally in the exact and distinct knowledge of the precedent state or disposition, unto which we do apply; for we cannot fit a garment except we first take measure of the body.
FRANCIS BACON
The Advancement of Learning
Suffering of sentient beings is like decay; it fertilizes the growth of their souls.
ANNE RICE
Memnoch the Devil
When someone does not know how to handle his own suffering, he allows it to spill all over the people around him. When you suffer, you make people around you suffer. That's very natural. This is why we have to learn how to handle our suffering, so we won't spread it everywhere.
THICH NHAT HANH
Anger
Suffering must be the inevitable tariff exacted from spirit for residing in human form.
MARK FROST
The List of Seven
As long as one suffers one lives.
GRAHAM GREENE
The End of the Affair
Extreme hopes are born of extreme misery.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
Unpopular Essays
Pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional.
AMERICAN PROVERB
It's the self that suffers, and there's a place where the self--ceases. I don't know how to say it. But I believe that the reality--the truth that I recognize in suffering as I don't in comfort and happiness--that the reality of pain is not pain. If you can get through it. If you can endure it all the way.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Dispossessed
Life is suffering
Tee-hee, ha-ha
Life is suffering
Tee-hee, ha-ha
Cold and shuddering
Tee-hee, ha-ha
Cruel and pummeling
Tee-hee, ha-ha
Smile on little buddha, smile on
Little buddha, smile on
It's only illusion then it's gone
TOAD THE WET SPROCKET
"Little Buddha"
There would be far less suffering amongst mankind, if men -- and God knows why they are so fashioned -- did not employ their imaginations so assiduously in recalling the memory of past sorrow, instead of bearing their present lot with equanimity.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Sorrows of Young Werther
Let a man live but two or three years without Affliction, and he is almost good for nothing.
WELLINS CALCOTT
Thoughts Moral and Divine
It is a comfort, in anguish, to be reminded of the scale of one's own troubles against the mighty breadth of the world.
JACQUELINE CAREY
Kushiel's Dart