quotations about pain
Pain is only what you allow it to be.
CASSANDRA CLARE
City of Ashes
The lessons we learn from pain are the ones that make us the strongest.
LIONEL LUTHOR
"Hidden", Smallville, 2005
Effort is only effort when it begins to hurt.
JOSÉ ORTEGA Y GASSET
attributed, Building a Life of Value
He knew that scar, that pain, that shame, that degradation that no metaphor could contain, inscribing it on his body. And yet beyond that, he was that scar, carved by hate and smallness and fear onto the world's face. He and everyone like him, until the earth was aflame with scarred black men dying in trees of fire.
CHRIS ABANI
Graceland
That is true nobility, true elevation of soul, when man can rise superior to any suffering and every pain, by the indwelling power given to him.
JOHANN GEORGE FORSTER
attributed, Day's Collacon
Take courage; pain's extremity soon ends.
AESCHYLUS
fragment
There is room in the halls of pleasure
For a large and lordly train,
But one by one we must all file on
Through the narrow isles of pain.
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX
"Solitude"
Pain is God's midwife, that helps some virtue into existence.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
We all know people who are so much afraid of pain that they shut themselves up like clams in a shell and, giving out nothing, receive nothing and therefore shrink until life is a mere living death.
ELEANOR ROOSEVELT
My Days
Pain is an interesting and off-putting thing. Few if any things in life concentrate our attention so completely and terribly, and few things are more boring to listen to or read about.
DAN SIMMONS
The Rise of Endymion
A person who feels pleasure in producing pain in someone else in a sexual relationship is also capable of enjoying as pleasure any pain which he may himself derive from sexual relations. A sadist is always at the same time a masochist.
SIGMUND FREUD
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
Face your life, its pain, its pleasure, leave no path untaken.
NEIL GAIMAN
The Graveyard Book
In misery we seem aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egotism: this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belongs to me and to no other.
GRAHAM GREENE
The End of the Affair
It is pain that changes our lives.
STEVE MARTIN
Shopgirl
Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
Tender is the Night
If thou take pain in what is good, the pains vanish, the good remains; if thou take pleasure in what is evil, the evil remains, and the pleasure vanishes. What art thou the worse for pains, or the better for pleasure when both are past?
FRANCIS QUARLES
Enchiridion
There is a great deal of pain in life and perhaps the only pain that can be avoided is the pain that comes from trying to avoid pain.
R. D. LAING
attributed, The Quotable Quote Book
There is such a thing as anesthesia of pain, engendered by pain too exquisite to be borne.
JACK LONDON
The Star Rover
When pain is over, the remembrance of it often becomes a pleasure.
JANE AUSTEN
Persuasion
Pain is truth; all else is subject to doubt.
J. M. COETZEE
Waiting for the Barbarians