Suffering Quotes

God wants to free us from ourselves, and there's nothing like suffering to show us that we need something bigger than our abilities and our strength and our explanations.

~ Tullian Tchividjian

Is the patience of the American people that long suffering? Is there no outrage left in the country?

~ Andrew Greeley

If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death, human life cannot be complete.

~ Viktor E. Frankl

Absence and death are the same - only that in death there is no suffering.

~ Theodore Roosevelt

All violence consists in some people forcing others, under threat of suffering or death, to do what they do not want to do.

~ Leo Tolstoy

There's nothing wrong in suffering, if you suffer for a purpose. Our revolution didn't abolish danger or death. It simply made danger and death worthwhile.

~ H. G. Wells

A filmmaker doesn't have to suffer to show suffering. You just have to understand it. You don't have to die to shoot a death scene.

~ David Lynch

Death remains about the one certain fact in the lives of each one of us, and there will be suffering, sorrow, and sadness next week as there was last week.

~ Basil Hume

If you're going to write about war, the ugly side is inevitable. Suffering and death are obviously part of war.

~ Phil Klay

If nothing else, there's comfort in recognising that no matter how much we fail and sin, death will limit our suffering.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

Girls' inner critics are starting to reveal themselves at a younger and younger age. And body image issues are an aspect of their lives which is causing them low self esteem and day-to-day suffering.

~ Elizabeth Berkley

An institution or reform movement that is not selfish, must originate in the recognition of some evil that is adding to the sum of human suffering, or diminishing the sum of happiness.

~ Clara Barton

You know that your happiness and suffering depend on the happiness and suffering of others. That insight helps you not to do wrong things that will bring suffering to yourself and to other people.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

It is not true that suffering ennobles the character; happiness does that sometimes, but suffering for the most part, makes men petty and vindictive.

~ W. Somerset Maugham

Happiness is not a reward - it is a consequence. Suffering is not a punishment - it is a result.

~ Robert Green Ingersoll

Happiness is the absence of suffering. I think it's an interesting way of looking at it. I think the absence of suffering exists very rarely in the world we live in.

~ Julie Christie

When we're dealing with the people in our family - no matter how annoying or gross they may be, no matter how self-inflicted their suffering may appear, no matter how afflicted they are with ignorance, prejudice or nose hairs - we give from the deepest parts of ourselves.

~ Anne Lamott

After so much suffering, after enduring so much sacrifice, sanctioned and embraced by our people, what is it that the people of East Timor expect as a result of independence?

~ Kay Rala Xanana Gusmao

Seeing much, suffering much, and studying much, are the three pillars of learning.

~ Benjamin Disraeli

Religion has convinced us that there's something else entirely other than concerns about suffering. There's concerns about what God wants, there's concerns about what's going to happen in the afterlife.

~ Sam Harris

People have a hard time letting go of their suffering. Out of a fear of the unknown, they prefer suffering that is familiar.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

Women have a predestination to suffering.

~ Bela Lugosi

Conscious of my own weakness, I can only seek fervently the guidance of the Ruler of the Universe, and, relying on His all-powerful aid, do my best to restore Union and peace to a suffering people, and to establish and guard their liberties and rights.

~ George B. Mcclellan

I pass over the toil and suffering and danger which attended the redemption and cultivation of their lands by the colonists, and turn to their civil condition and to the conduct and history of the government.

~ William H. Wharton

Was it not enough punishment and suffering in history that we were uprooted and made helpless slaves not only in new colonial outposts but also domestically.

~ Robert Mugabe

History provides neither compensation for suffering nor penalties for wrong.

~ John Acton

Israel's creation was politically amazing and caused by a number of unusual events. And I understand. For centuries, Jews endured horrible suffering, and like other people, deserve the right to self-determination, but the way Israel is going now frightens me. Jews make awkward colonial overlords.

~ Harvey Pekar

The greater the state, the more wrong and cruel its patriotism, and the greater is the sum of suffering upon which its power is founded.

~ Leo Tolstoy

Easter is reflecting upon suffering for one thing, but it also reflects upon Jesus and his non compliance in the face of great authority where he holds to his truth - so there's two stories there.

~ Michael Leunig

Everybody should have a fair deal; everybody should have the chance to life in this world. If we were evolved as human beings, we would hopefully be able to alleviate suffering in the world.

~ Vivienne Westwood

Suffering by nature or chance never seems so painful as suffering inflicted on us by the arbitrary will of another.

~ Arthur Schopenhauer

A season of suffering is a small assignment when compared to the reward. Rather than begrudge your problem, explore it. Ponder it. And most of all, use it. Use it to the glory of God.

~ Max Lucado

The most wonderful study of mankind is man. Relieving human suffering and diffusing universal knowledge is humanitarian.

~ Daniel D. Palmer

The reward of suffering is experience.

~ Harry S Truman

The striking thing about the Precious Blood is the bond it establishes between love and suffering in our experience, a bond that has become so close that we have come to think of suffering accepted with joy as the most authentic sign of love with any depth at all.

~ Gabriel Marcel

Suffering is but another name for the teaching of experience, which is the parent of instruction and the schoolmaster of life.

~ Horace

Neuroscience has proven that similar areas of the brain are activated both in the person who suffers and in the one who feels empathy. Thus, empathic suffering is a true experience of suffering.

~ Matthieu Ricard

Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dream.

~ Paulo Coelho

What people fear most about tragedy is its randomness - a taxi cab jumps the curb and hits a pedestrian, a gun misfires and kills a bystander. Better to have some rational cause and effect between incident and injury. And if cause and effect aren't possible, better that there at least be some reward for all the suffering.

~ Jeffrey Kluger

Injustice is censured because the censures are afraid of suffering, and not from any fear which they have of doing injustice.

~ Plato