Suffering Quotes

If pain must come, may it come quickly. Because I have a life to live, and I need to live it in the best way possible. If he has to make a choice, may he make it now. Then I will either wait for him or forget him.

~ Paulo Coelho

What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.

~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The whole image is that eternal suffering awaits anyone who questions God's infinite love. That's the message we're brought up with, isn't it? Believe or die! Thank you, forgiving Lord, for all those options.

~ Bill Hicks

Perhaps watching someone you love suffer can teach you even more than suffering yourself can.

~ Dodie Smith

It is that we are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love, never no helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object of its love.

~ Sigmund Freud

Contrary to what we may have been taught to think, unnecessary and unchosen suffering wounds us but need not scar us for life. It does mark us. What we allow the mark of our suffering to become is in our own hands.

~ Bell Hooks

The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive.

~ John Green

Suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but - I hope - into a better shape.

~ Charles Dickens

Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?

~ John Keats

At some point we all look up and realize we are lost in a maze.

~ John Green

Happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain.

~ Thomas Hardy

When you compare the sorrows of real life to the pleasures of the imaginary one, you will never want to live again, only to dream forever.

~ Alexandre Dumas

You will suffer, son of Hades!’ What else is new? Nico thought.

~ Rick Riordan

I want to see beauty. In the ugly, in the sink, in the suffering, in the daily, in all the days before I die, the moments before I sleep.

~ Ann Voskamp

I began to understand that suffering and disappointments and melancholy are there not to vex us or cheapen us or deprive us of our dignity but to mature and transfigure us.

~ Hermann Hesse

Anything was better than nothing. Half-full was better than empty. Ignorance was the lowest form of humiliation and suffering.

~ Becca Fitzpatrick

Never stop just because you feel defeated. The journey to the other side is attainable only after great suffering.

~ Santosh Kalwar

Whether you like it or not, you are committed to the human endeavor. I cannot ally myself with such a purely negative goal as avoidance of suffering. Suffering is a chance you take by the fact of being alive.

~ William S. Burroughs

She had become accustomed to being lonely. She was used to walking alone and to being considered 'different.' She did not suffer too much.

~ Betty Smith

God uses broken things. It takes broken soil to produce a crop, broken clouds to give rain, broken grain to give bread, broken bread to give strength. It is the broken alabaster box that gives forth perfume. It is Peter, weeping bitterly, who returns to greater power than ever.

~ Vance Havner

Until you have suffered much in your heart, you cannot learn humility.

~ Thaddeus Of Vitovnica

With a hint of good judgment, to fear nothing, not failure or suffering or even death, indicates that you value life the most. You live to the extreme; you push limits; you spend your time building legacies. Those do not die.

~ Criss Jami

A student, filled with emotion and crying, implored, Why is there so much suffering?Suzuki Roshi replied, No reason.

~ Shunryu Suzuki

Were we incapable of empathy – of putting ourselves in the position of others and seeing that their suffering is like our own – then ethical reasoning would lead nowhere. If emotion without reason is blind, then reason without emotion is impotent.

~ Peter Singer

O world, world when I was younger I thought there was some order governing you and your deeds. But now you seem to be a labyrinth of errors, a frightful desert, a den of wild beasts, a game in which men move in circles…a stony field, a meadow full of serpents, a flowering but barren orchard, a spring of cares, a river of tears, a sea of suffering, a vain hope.

~ Fernando De Rojas

A thought is harmless unless we believe it. It’s not our thoughts, but our attachment to our thoughts, that causes suffering. Attaching to a thought means believing that it’s true, without inquiring. A belief is a thought that we’ve been attaching to, often for years.

~ Byron Katie

They'll say you are bador perhaps you are mador at least you should stay undercover.Your mind must be bareif you would dareto think you can love more than one lover.

~ David Rovics

Time has always been the greatest ally to Truth, because Time eventually relieves and reveals all.

~ Suzy Kassem

... the four noble truths: that there is suffering, that it has an origin, that there is a cessation of suffering, and that there is a path to that cessation.

~ Sid Brown

Some, often without knowing it, suffered from being deprived of the company of friends and from their inability to get in touch with them through the usual channels of friendship, letters, trains, and boats. Others, fewer these, Tarrou may have been one of them, had desired reunion with something they couldn't have defined, but which seemed to them the only desirable thing on earth. For want of a better name, they sometimes called it peace.

~ Albert Camus

Damn it, how will I ever get out of this labyrinth?

~ Simon Bolivar

Nothing forces us to knowWhat we do not want to knowExcept pain

~ Aeschylus

Claiming to love self, but willingly default to cheating at the first sign of trouble is nothing short of playing yourself. Your ego may feel avenged - temporarily - but your heart and soul, the true self, will suffer the long term affects of karma's justifiable sting.

~ T.f. Hodge

Ultimately, in the battle against lies and violence, truth and love have no other weapon than the witness of suffering.

~ Pope Benedict Xvi

Let the first act of every morning be to make the following resolve for the day:- I shall not fear anyone on Earth. - I shall fear only God. - I shall not bear ill will toward anyone. - I shall not submit to injustice from anyone. - I shall conquer untruth by truth. And in resisting untruth, I shall put up with all suffering.

~ Mahatma Gandhi

Our tendency in the midst of suffering is to turn on God. To get angry and bitter and shake our fist at the sky and say, God, you don't know what it's like! You don't understand! You have no idea what I'm going through. You don't have a clue how much this hurts. The cross is God's way of taking away all of our accusations, excuses, and arguments.The cross is God taking on flesh and blood and saying, Me too.

~ Rob Bell

Love is as simple as the absence of self given to another. God, when invited, fills the void of any unrequited love; hence loving is how one is drawn closer to God no matter its most horrific repercussions.

~ Criss Jami

Poor God, how often He is blamed for all the suffering in theworld. It’s like praising Satan for allowing all the good that happens.

~ E.a. Bucchianeri

Our vision is so limited we can hardly imagine a love that does not show itself in protection from suffering. The love of God is of a different nature altogether. It does not hate tragedy. It never denies reality. It stands in the very teeth of suffering.

~ Elisabeth Elliot

The poor man shuddered, overflowed with an angelic joy; he declared in his transport that this would last through life; he said to himself that he really had not suffered enough to deserve such radiant happiness, and he thanked God, in the depths of his soul, for having permitted that he, a miserable man, should be so loved by this innocent being.

~ Victor Hugo