Suffering Quotes

I think the function of suffering is to let me know that my perception is skewed; what I’m doing is judging natural events in such a way that I am creating suffering within myself. For instance, you have pain over certain conditions, certain situations that occur. And if you just say ‘ok, here I am, I’m going to experience the pain,’ you don’t suffer. The resistance and the degree of the resistance to the natural phenomenon of life causes tremendous suffering.

~ Hubert Selby Jr.

Accept the long night patiently, quietly, humbly, and resignedly as intended for your true good. It is not a punishment for sin committed but an instrument of annihilating egoism.

~ Paul Brunton

Sigmund Freud once asserted, Let one attempt to expose a number of the most diverse people uniformly to hunger. With the increase of the imperative urge of hunger all individual differences will blur, and in their stead will appear the uniform expression of the one unstilled urge. Thank heaven, Sigmund Freud was spared knowing the concentration camps from the inside. His subjects lay on a couch designed in the plush style of Victorian culture, not in the filth of Auschwitz. There, the individual differences did not blur but, on the contrary, people became more different; people unmasked themselves, both the swine and the saints.

~ Viktor E. Frankl

Love of God is pure when joy and suffering inspire an equal degree of gratitude.

~ Simone Weil

Only a Woman, divine, could know all that a woman can suffer.

~ Willa Cather

The world? The world is not interested in us. Today, everything is possible, even the crematoria...

~ Elie Wiesel

The secrets of alchemy exist to transform mortals from a state of suffering and ignorance to a state of enlightenment and bliss.

~ Deepak Chopra

Nothing a man suffers will prevent him from inflicting suffering on others. Indeed, it will teach him the way

~ Barry Unsworth

She enjoyed her own pain by this egoism of suffering, if I may so express it. This aggravation of suffering and this rebelling in it I could understand; it is the enjoyment of man, of the insulted and injured, oppressed by destiny, and smarting under the sense of its injustice.

~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

It is easy to suffer for a cause or for a mission; this ennobles the heart of the person suffering. But how to explain suffering because of a man? It's not explainable. With that kind of suffering, a person feels as if they're in hell, because there is no nobility, no greatness - only misery.

~ Paulo Coelho

It would be most right, and most wise, and, therefore must involve least suffering.

~ Jane Austen

That's evolution. Evolution's always hard. Hard and bleak. No such thing as happy evolution

~ Haruki Murakami

Suffering — how divine it is, how misunderstood! We owe to it all that is good in us, all that gives value to life; we owe to it pity, we owe to it courage, we owe to it all the virtues.

~ Anatole France

Let me have a faithful account of all that concerns you; I would know everything, be it ever so unfortunate. Perhaps by mingling my sighs with yours I may make your sufferings less, for it is said that all sorrows divided are made lighter.

~ Héloïse D'argenteuil

Demon or not, it didn't matter, suffering was everywhere he looked.

~ Brom

At last she sighed.But the most wretched thing — is it not? — is to drag out, as I do, a useless existence. If our pains were only of some use to someone, we should find consolation in the thought of the sacrifice.

~ Gustave Flaubert

He had discovered that the choice between self-love or love of something other than self offers no escape from suffering either way, it is merely a choice between two woundings, of the pride or of the heart.

~ Elizabeth Goudge

Ethically, she couldn't cause the suffering of any living thing. Logically, bacon cheeseburgers were delicious.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

It's an awful truth that suffering can deepen us, give a greater lustre to our colours, a richer resonance to our words. That is, if it doesn't destroy us, if it doesn't burn away the optimism and the spirit, the capacity for visions, and the respect for simple yet indispensable things.

~ Anne Rice

That which tears open our souls, those holes that splatter our sight, may actually become the thin, open places to see through the mess of this place to the heart-aching beauty beyond. To Him. To the God whom we endlessly crave.

~ Ann Voskamp

...stories that rise from deep suffering can provide the most potent remedies for past, present, and even future ills.

~ Clarissa Pinkola Estés

Becoming aware of the intense suffering of billions of animals, and of our own participation in that suffering, can bring up painful emotions: sorrow and grief for the animals; anger at the injustice and deception of the system; despair at the enormity of the problem; fear that trusted authorities and institutions are, in fact, untrustworthy; and guilt for having contributed to the problem. Bearing witness means choosing to suffer. Indeed, empathy is literally 'feeling with.' Choosing to suffer is particularly difficult in a culture that is addicted to comfort--a culture that teaches that pain should be avoided whenever possible and that ignorance is bliss. We can reduce our resistance to witnessing by valuing authenticity over personal pleasure, and integration over ignorance.

~ Melanie Joy

Suffering is the greatest treasure on earth; it purifies the soul. In suffering, we learn who our true friend is.

~ Maria Faustina Kowalska

We rise up And we fall downOnly to rise again

~ Karen Hackel

The priest gazed around my cell and answered in a voice that sounded very weary to me. 'Every stone here sweats with suffering, I know that. I have never looked at them without a feeling of anguish. But deep in my heart I know that the most wretched among you have seen a divine face emerge from their darkness. That is the face you are asked to see.'This perked me up a little. I said I had been looking at the stones in these walls for months. There wasn't anything or anyone in the world I knew better. Maybe at one time, way back, I had searched for a face in them. But the face I was looking for was as bright as the sun and the flame of desire—and it belonged to Marie.

~ Albert Camus

It would then be brought abruptly to an end, for the brightness had shown suffering the way.

~ Markus Zusak

Suffering ceases to be suffering when we form a clear picture of it.

~ Richard Paul Evans

The only thing suffering teaches us is that we are capable of suffering.

~ Melvin Jules Bukiet

If the immediate and direct purpose of our life is not suffering then our existence is the most ill-adapted to its purpose in the world.

~ Arthur Schopenhauer

We put ourselves through hell and that is hell.

~ Marty Rubin

In all Thénardier's outpourings, the words and gestures, the fury blazing in his eyes, this explosion of an evil nature brazenly exposed, the mixture of bravado and abjectness, arrogance, pettiness, rage, absurdity; the hodgepodge of genuine distress, and lying sentiment, the shamelessness of a vicious man rejoicing in viciousness, the bare crudity of an ugly soul -- in this eruption of all suffering and hatred there was something which was hideous as evil itself and still as poignant as truth.

~ Victor Hugo

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.

~ Honoré De Balzac

We cannot consent to be judged by someone who has suffered less than ourselves. And since each of us regards himself as an unrecognized Job...

~ Emil M. Cioran

Love hurts because we think that's what love is.

~ Marty Rubin

The pleasures of love are really quite wonderful--though I suspect they are rather a luxury and require a certain level of socioeconomic stability to be anything other than a mode of suffering.

~ Samuel R. Delany

But where is the antidote for lucid despair, perfectly articulated, proud, and sure? All of us are miserable, but how many know it? The consciousness of misery is too serious a disease to figure in an arithmetic of agonies or in the catalogues of the Incurable. It belittles the prestige of hell, and converts the slaughterhouses of time into idyls. What sin have you committed to be born, what crime to exist? Your suffering like your fate is without motive. To suffer, truly to suffer, is to accept the invasion of ills without the excuse of causality, as a favor of demented nature, as a negative miracle. . .

~ Emil M. Cioran

I could not answer the ceaseless inward question-why I thus suffered; now, at the distance of-I will not say how many years, I see it clearly.

~ Charlotte Brontë

If something came out of the deal, it couldn’t make things any worse for us than they already were, I thought. But I couldn’t have been more wrong. Hell has no true bottom.

~ Haruki Murakami

It was suffering and incapacity that created all afterworlds - this, and that brief madness of bliss which is experienced only by those who suffer deeply. Weariness that wants to reach the ultimate with one leap, with one fatal leap, a poor ignorant weariness that does not want to want any more: this created all gods and afterworlds.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

The struggle of today, is not altogether for today - it is for a vast future also.

~ Abraham Lincoln