Suffering Quotes

People talked so foolishly, I thought, about the ennobling effects of suffering. No doubt the philosophy that tells you your soul grows through grief and sorrow is right--ultimately. But I don't think this is the case at first. At first, pain beyond a certain point merely makes you lifeless, and apathetic to everything but itself.

~ Vera Brittain

I must acknowledge that though his adoption embodies graciousness, it is also a reminder this world is not as it should be. Brokenness permeates our world. Sure, beauty is born from ashes, but the ashes don't just magically disappear. Suffering and all that is wrong in this world still exists. This side of heaven, tragedy remains and the moments of her son becoming ours is a representation of joy and suffering deeply intertwined. Our son, the living proof and blessing that love is what makes a family, reminds us that adoption is born out of undeniable loss. Irrevocable loss of wholeness, of what was meant to be.To only acknowledge the beauty without giving voice to the tragedy, is to detract from adoption. In diminishing the tragedy of adoption, I decrease my son's story, along with others a part of the adoption circle. I would be choosing to ignore a massive portion of who he is.

~ Natalie Brenner

From watching Silvia, I'd learned that one of the worst things about being ill is that most people find your suffering opaque. With this sadness it was different. I felt that I needed to nurture and protect it from people's understanding. I wanted Susy's sympathy because I wanted comfort and to feel less alone, and yet I also didn't want it—I didn't want my personal grief to be part of something universal right then.

~ Olivia Sudjic

You are afraid to suffer, but it were better to thank God for it, since the more you undergo down here, the less you will endure above. Grief is a portion of one's heritage taken in advance from Purgatory.

~ Saint Lydwine Of Schiedam

Suffering is so real & I walk amongst so many who have no idea how much my soul is aching to be healed.

~ Nikki Rowe

You don’t have a monopoly on pain or loss. It’s a level playing field—we all lose—we all grieve. It’s what remains afterwards that defines us. Guilt is the poison we pump into our own veins. It’s self-inflicted torture.

~ R. W. Patterson

Three, 300, or 3000 - these are the number of unknown days, each too little and too much at the same time, to see an irrevocably declined loved one languish and suffer, with death lingering in the doorway, but never quite being sent all the way in, to comfort and carry our loved one to that Better Place.

~ Connie Kerbs

If God is Love, He is, by definition, something more than mere kindness. And it appears, from all the records, that though He has often rebuked us and condemned us, He has never regarded us with contempt. He has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense.

~ C.s. Lewis

Suffering is a jealous and lonely state. It can't abide the company of anything else. It is greedy, it demands all of one's energies.

~ Shannon Huffman Polson

Well, the gold fish in the bowl lay upside down bloatingFull in the sky and the plains were bleached white with skeletonsVarious species grouped together accordingTo their past beliefsThe only way they ever all got together wasNot in love but shameful grief

~ Don Van Vliet

Beyond aspects of pain that are physical, thought Oppenheimer, sickness or injury or privation, beyond the so-called obvious, suffering can be a work of art. It can be made of buried and rising things, helpless and undiscovered, song of frustrated want, silence after desire. It can be the test of the self falling short, constrained, distorted, disturbed or rebuffed, the vacuum left by longing, call without an answer.

~ Lydia Millet

He had pulled out of that grief, eventually – out from under the suffocating weight of it. Suffering had formed him: made him silent and deliberate, thoughtful: deep.

~ Amanda Coplin

My pain builds like storm clouds―massive, dark, and heavy with teardrops. Moisture falls torrential as if my world is a violent, eternal downpour; however, at long last the source runs dry and the bitter storm does cease. Blue skies dare to glow where the gloom has dissipated. I breathe it in, hoping to cleanse my inner soul. A laden heart tells me the truth: the clear sky is an illusion. Old pain rushes back like a flood, providing means for clouds to form and expand once again until it is too much to bear and the heaviness turns to rain. I cannot find refuge from this woe. It is my never-ending heartache.

~ Richelle E. Goodrich

She had not had the relief of amnesia. She had suffered longer, and she had suffered more. Each second was agony in the first weeks. She was like an amputee in the days before anesthesia, half crazed with pain, astounded that the human body could feel so much and not die of it. But slowly, cell by painful cell, she began to mend. There came a time when it was no longer her whole body that burned with pain but only her heart. And then there came a time when even her heart was able, for a time at least, to feel other emotions besides grief.

~ Diane Setterfield

Secrets are festering parasites to a relationship, devouring their hosts from within, leaving behind a empty hollow husk of what once was.

~ Mark W. Boyer

The cross, therefore, is always ready; it awaits you everywhere. No matter where you may go, you cannot escape it, for wherever you go you take yourself with you and shall always find yourself. Turn where you will—above, below, without, or within—you will find a cross in everything, and everywhere you must have patience if you would have peace within and merit an eternal crown.

~ Thomas À Kempis

He would be able to suffer what his son had suffered. He would be able to suffer and his suffering would for an instance displace his grief.

~ Simon Lelic

When words can't make it better, hold my hand and don't let go.

~ Richelle E. Goodrich

...there's the suffering from love and the suffering from grief - either pain permanently scars the soul...

~ John Geddes

Happy, even in anguish, is he to whom God has given a soul worthy of love and grief! He who has not seen the things of this world, and the heart of men in this double light, has seen nothing, and knows noting of the truth.

~ Victor Hugo

My sister Emily first declined. The details of her illness are deep-branded in my memory, but to dwell on them, either in thought or narrative, is not in my power. Never in all her life had she lingered over any task that lay before her, and she did not linger now. She sank rapidly. She made haste to leave us. Yet, while physically she perished, mentally, she grew stronger than we had yet known her. Day by day, when I saw with what a front she met suffering, I looked on her with anguish of wonder and love. I have seen nothing like it; but, indeed, I have never seen her parallel in anything. Stronger than a man, simpler than a child, her nature stood alone. The awful point was, that, while full of ruth for others, on herself she had no pity; the spirit inexorable to the flesh; from the trembling hand, the unnerved limbs, the faded eyes, the same service exacted as they had rendered in health. To stand by and witness this, and not dare to remonstrate, was pain no words can render.

~ Charlotte Brontë

Those who suffer much, have much to say.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

When you've suffered a great deal in life, each additional pain is both unbearable and trifling.

~ Yann Martel

No one wants to occupy a black hole of sadness and despair or slip on the tight rope that separates sanity from insanity, and reside in a vortex devoid of reality. I entered the world as a freeman and desire to escape a state of existential vertigo. I yearn to discover a synthesizing spirit of my being and hold my head high, free of doubt, and devoid of fear. I wish to foment the cerebral energy to stave off premature destruction and forevermore blunt an intolerable state of anguish.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

without room for improvement, where would we have our purpose, if I had all that I wanted, I would have to lose increments to give myself the purpose to obtain again, without goals, without the challenge what are they? Maybe rising to meet the maintenance, learning new things, stepping out of comfort zones, accomplishing new goals, facing new challenges is a part of what happiness is about... others deserve their right to live inalienably, but i feel like I deserve my right to suffer.

~ Marouane Laassafar

I close my eyes and press my face into his shirt and howl against him, liquid agony pouring from me. He smooths my hair from my face and continues to murmur, but he never shushes me, never tells me to stop. Never tells me it'll be all right. He knows life too well to believe such lies.

~ Aprilynne Pike

Incarnation is good news not because it offers us a way out of the mess of this world, but because it shows us what God's love looks like here and now.

~ Jamie Arpin-Ricci

If your anger is the result of your sadness or if your sadness is result of your anger , you are undoubtedly suffering from disorientation.

~ Aparna Pathak

Sometimes I think my scars are beautiful, but then I remember not everyone shares the same love of art.

~ Piper Payne

If love were human I would’ve set them on fire by now — a screaming blaze of smoke and flesh. I’d breathe in the blackness once more just to feel love’s destruction, its mortality filling in the hollow of my ribcage without a heart.

~ Piper Payne

All mental unhappiness is the avoidance of legitimate suffering.

~ Stefan Molyneux

But I am bound upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears do scald like moulten lead.

~ William Shakespeare

The parts of me that hurt the worst want me to write something for them, but I can't. I don't know what to say. I'm lost in all this sadness, and so are they.

~ Ashly Lorenzana

You are not suffering yesterday or tomorrow. You are only suffering your memory and your imagination.

~ Sadghuru

It is often simply from lack of creative imagination that we do not go far enough in suffering.

~ Marcel Proust

The lot of man is to suffer and die.What's gone is of no consequence.

~ Steve Berry

If men could become pregnant - or be legally raped, or understand the unsubtle differences between 'yes' and 'no', i am certain you would soon see them change their tune about abortion and the treatment and trivialization of the suffering of rape victims.

~ Christina Engela

On no account should you entertain being a victim of your own circumstances. When unexpected failure occurs, you can turn it into success.

~ Israelmore Ayivor

Dream thieves are those who leave their real dreams aside and struggle to pick other people's dreams to work on. They suffer to do attempt what they can't do

~ Israelmore Ayivor

He loves me so he hurts meTo try and make me good.It doesn't work. I'm just too badAnd don't do what I should.My memory has so many different sections and, like all survivors, there are so many compartments with so many triggers. I'll remember a smell which reminds me of a man which reminds me of a place which reminds me of another man who I think was with a woman who had a certain smell — and I'm back to square one. This is the case for most survivors, I believe. When we try to put together our pasts, the triggers are many and varied, the memories are disjointed — and why wouldn't they be? We were children. Even someone with an idyllic childhood who is only trying to remember the lovely things which happened to them will scratch their head and wonder who gave them that doll and was it for Christmas or their third birthday? Did they have a party when they were four or five? When did they go on a plane for the first time? You see, even happy memories are hard to piece together — so imagine how hard it is to collate all of the trauma, to pull together all of the things I've been trying to push away for so many years.

~ Laurie Matthew