Suffering Quotes

Every man or woman who loves [God], they hate Him too, because He's a hard God, a jealous God, He Is, what He Is, and in this world He's apt to repay service with pain while those who do evil ride over the roads in Cadillac cars. Even the joy of serving Him is a bitter joy.

~ Stephen King

Nobody wants to be alone in misery. Cara experienced no shame in admitting that need. Not only did she not want to suffer alone, she demanded co-suffering from all who dared love her.

~ Christa Parravani

Time and sunshine healed a sore, but the process was slow, and new boils appeared if I didn't stay dry.

~ Yann Martel

When you suffer and lose, that does not mean you are being disobedient to God. In fact, it might mean you're right in the center of His will. The path of obedience is often marked by times of suffering and loss.

~ Charles R. Swindoll

Josh joined her at the window. She let him look. He should know that the world was not all lessons and iguanas and Nintendo. It was also this muddy simple boy tethered like an animal.

~ George Saunders

o endure the cross is not tragedy, it is the suffering which is the fruit of an exclusive allegiance to Jesus Christ.

~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer

I venture to say Kierkegaard meant that truth has lost its force with us and horrible pain and evil must teach it to us again, the eternal punishments of Hell will have to regain their reality before mankind turns serious once more. I do not see this. Let us set aside the fact that such convictions in the mouths of safe, comfortable people playing at crisis, alienation, apocalypse and desperation, make me sick. We must get it out of our heads that this is a doomed time, that we are waiting for the end, and th rest of it, mere junk from fashionable magazines. Things are grim enough without these shivery games. People frightening one another--a poor sort of moral exercise. But, to get to the main point, the advocacy and praise of suffering take us in the wrong direction and those of us who remain loyal to civilization must not go for it. You have to have the power to employ pain, to repent, to be illuminated, you must have the opportunity and even the time.

~ Saul Bellow

Help me to get my eyes off my suffering and onto you, God.

~ Shirley Corder

We will never become the people of hope and blessing we're meant to be until we learn how to wake up and pay attention to the glory and pain, beauty and suffering that are in lives all around us.

~ Richard Dahlstrom

Christ wrought out His perfect obedience as a man, through temptation, and by suffering.

~ Alexander Maclaren

I had been so focused on why we were suffering through all these adversities that I had neglected to think about who could get me through them or how God was going to mold our hardships to be for his glory.

~ Tracie Miles

What a mistake that had been, to create a construct [AI] that could suffer. He knew that now. Life, pain, death, they were no playthings. Biology was serious business, not for amateurs and foolish gods.

~ David Marusek

When we oppose oppression, we lift our hands from the collective reins that empower such oppression.

~ Bryant Mcgill

It made no sense to him, this idea that some people got God and some people didn't.

~ Kaya Mclaren

in my cowardice I became at once a man, and did what all we grown men do when face to face with suffering and injustice; I preferred not to see them

~ Marcel Proust

It's not life or death, the labyrinth. Suffering. Doing wrong and having wrong things happen to you.

~ John Green

The Christian doctrine of suffering explains, I believe, a very curious fact about the world we live in. The settled happiness and security which we all desire, God withholds from us by the nature of the world: but joy, pleasure, and merriment He has scattered broadcast...The security we crave would teach us to rest our hearts in this world and oppose an obstacle to our return to God...Our Father refreshes us on the journey with some pleasant inns, but will not encourage us to mistake them for home.

~ C.s. Lewis

For a torture to be effective, the pain has to be spread out; it has to come at regular intervals, with no end in sight. The water falls , drop after drop after drop, like the second hand of a watch, carving up time. The shock of each individual drop is insignificant, but the sensation is impossible to ignore. At first, one might manage to think about other things, but after five hours, after ten hours, it becomes unendurable. The repeated stimulation excites the nerves to a point where they literally explode, and every sensation in the body is absorbed into that one spot on the forehead---indeed, you come to feel that you are nothing but a forehead, into which a fine needle is being forced millimeter by millimeter. You can’t sleep or even speak, hypnotized by a suffering that is greater than any mere pain. In general, the victim goes mad before a day has passed.

~ Yōko Ogawa

She would have thought that working and living in continuous happiness, harmony, and security day after day would lead to mental lethargy, that her writing would suffer from too much happiness, that she needed a balanced life with down days and miseries to keep the sharp edge on her work. But the idea that an artist needed to suffer to do her best work was a conceit of the young and inexperienced. The happier she grew, the better she wrote.

~ Dean Koontz

Could God have justified Himself before human history, so full of suffering, without placing Christ's Cross at the center of that history? . . . But God, who besides being Omnipotence is Wisdom and--to repeat once again--Love, desires to justify Himself to mankind. He is not the Absolute that remains outside of the world, indifferent to human suffering. he is Emmanuel, God-with-us, a God who shares man's lot and participates in his destiny.

~ John Paul Ii

I love my mother.My mother loves my dad.Those two facts are undeniable.I want my father to live.I want him to fight to live as long as he can.My mother wants to let him pass.She does not want him suffering anymore.She says that I am not there in the middle of the night at home, when he begs her to let him die.I say that he should not be taking the medicine that the doctor is prescribing, that it made Mike Tyson want to eat his opponents young.

~ Johna Passaro

The acts of daily forbearance, the headache, or toothache, or heavy cold; the tiresome peculiarities of husband or wife, the broken glass...all of these sufferings, small as they are, if accepted lovingly, are most pleasing to God's Goodness.

~ Francis De Sales

God does not remove us from all harm, He uses harm to move us close to Him.

~ Dillon Burroughs

No doubt Pain as God's megaphone is a terrible instrument, it may lead to final and unrepented rebellion. But it gives the only opportunity the bad man can have for amendment. It removes the veil, it plants the flag of truth within the fortress of a rebel soul.

~ C.s. Lewis

Oh, with my pathetic, earthly, Euclidean mind, I know only that there is suffering, that none are to blame, that all things follow simply and directly from one another, that everything flows and finds its level - but that is all just Euclidean gibberish, of course I know that, and of course I cannot consent to live by it! What do I care that none are to blame and that I know it - I need retribution, otherwise I will destroy myself. And retribution not somewhere and sometime in infinity, but here and now, on earth, so that I see it myself. I have believed, and I want to see for myself, and if I am dead by that time, let them resurrect me, because it will be too unfair if it all takes place without me. Is it possible that I've suffered so that I, together with my evil deeds and sufferings, should be manure for someone's future harmony? I want to see with my own eyes the hind lie down with the lion, and the murdered man rise up and embrace his murderer. I want to be there when everyone suddenly finds out what it was all for.

~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

What stirs lyrical poets to their finest flights is neither the delight of the senses nor the fruitful contentment of the settled couple; not the satisfaction of love, but its passion. And passion means suffering.

~ Denis De Rougemont

I alone knew what I had suffered. I alone knew what it felt like to be alive but dead.

~ Phoolan Devi

Suffering is universal. It's the one thing Buddhists, Christians, and Muslims are all worried about.

~ John Green

He enables [his children] to walk before him, he holds their hand in difficulties, he himself carries them along in hardships that he sees as being otherwise unbearable to them.

~ Francis De Sales

It is much more easy to have sympathy with suffering than it is to have sympathy with thought.

~ Oscar Wilde

What need is there to say more?The childish work for their own benefit,The Buddhas work for the benefit of others.Just look at the difference between them.If I do not exchange my happiness, for the suffering of others, I shall not attain the state of Buddhahood.And even in Samsara I shall have no real joy. The source of all misery in the world lies in thinking of oneself;The source of all happiness lies in thinking of others.

~ Śāntideva

We may not understand why certain things occur in our lives, but we understand who to run to when they do.

~ Dillon Burroughs

it’s not enough for Christians merely to recognize that the world isn’t what it ought to be and that people are suffering in ways they shouldn’t have to suffer.” Instead, our “sorrow and indignation” should prompt us to act in ways that “subvert” that brokenness.

~ Ed Stetzer

Woman, the child of so many tears shall never perish.

~ Ambrose Of Milan

Where two or more are gathered in the name of Man, that is civilization, that is Order, and that is the beginnings of brutality and suffering.

~ Christopher Dutton

Christ is sufficient. We do not need support groups for each and every separate tribulation. The most widely divergent sorrows may all be taken to the foot of the same old rugged cross and find there cleansing, peace, and joy.

~ Elisabeth Elliot

Straight tribulation is easier to bear than tribulation which advertises itself as pleasure.

~ C.s. Lewis

...it was inevitable I loved you - we were soul mates - for the same reason, we were fated to suffer...

~ John Geddes

When you observe that the fire in your room is getting dull, you do not always put on more coal, but simply stir with the poker; so God often uses the black poker of adversity in order that the flames of devotion may burn more brightly.

~ Arthur W. Pink

The world is already yours - why try to conquer it?

~ Rasheed Ogunlaru