quotations about suffering
Birth, death, and suffering all bring us to the very edge of what our minds can understand.
RAM DASS
One-Liners: A Mini-Manual for a Spiritual Life
When someone does not know how to handle his own suffering, he allows it to spill all over the people around him. When you suffer, you make people around you suffer. That's very natural. This is why we have to learn how to handle our suffering, so we won't spread it everywhere.
THICH NHAT HANH
Anger
Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seamed with scars.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or of the sight of an eye. We may not miss them, either, for one minute in a year, but if we should there is nothing to be done about it.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
Tender Is the Night
There would be far less suffering amongst mankind, if men -- and God knows why they are so fashioned -- did not employ their imaginations so assiduously in recalling the memory of past sorrow, instead of bearing their present lot with equanimity.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Sorrows of Young Werther
Fire tests gold, suffering tests brave men.
LATIN PROVERB
Some people seem to be born to suffer.
AUGUST STRINDBERG
Easter
One must cast off old agonies as a snake casts off its skin--only to grow a new set and accept all of their limitations.
FRANK HERBERT
Children of Dune
It's the self that suffers, and there's a place where the self--ceases. I don't know how to say it. But I believe that the reality--the truth that I recognize in suffering as I don't in comfort and happiness--that the reality of pain is not pain. If you can get through it. If you can endure it all the way.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Dispossessed
Life is suffering
Tee-hee, ha-ha
Life is suffering
Tee-hee, ha-ha
Cold and shuddering
Tee-hee, ha-ha
Cruel and pummeling
Tee-hee, ha-ha
Smile on little buddha, smile on
Little buddha, smile on
It's only illusion then it's gone
TOAD THE WET SPROCKET
"Little Buddha"
But when that we speak of suffering, we do not speak of a dull and neglected suffering, but of a wise and industrious suffering, which draweth and contriveth use and advantage out of that which seemeth adverse and contrary; which is that properly which we call accommodating or applying. Now the wisdom of application resteth principally in the exact and distinct knowledge of the precedent state or disposition, unto which we do apply; for we cannot fit a garment except we first take measure of the body.
FRANCIS BACON
The Advancement of Learning
Misery loves company, particularly when she is herself the hostess, and can give generously of her stores to others.
JOHN KENDRICK BANGS
"The Spectre Cook of Bangletop"
Let a man live but two or three years without Affliction, and he is almost good for nothing.
WELLINS CALCOTT
Thoughts Moral and Divine
Still to the sufferer comes, as due from God, a glory that to suffering owes its birth.
AESCHYLUS
fragment
As long as one suffers one lives.
GRAHAM GREENE
The End of the Affair
Suffering is not increased by numbers; one body can contain all the suffering the world can feel.
GRAHAM GREENE
The Quiet American
War, pain and suffering is a form of cleansing that will shock people awake.
ISMAIL ROYER
"Fourteen years ago, he was a convicted jihadist. Now he's fighting radical Islam steps from the White House.", Washington Post, July 7, 2017
Suffering is dysfunctional, except as a bodily warning against danger. Psychologically and socially it's merely destructive.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Dispossessed
What is there? I know first of all that I am. But who am I? All I know of myself is that I suffer. And if I suffer it is because at the origin of myself there is mutilation, separation. I am separated. What I am separated from -- I cannot name it. But I am separated.
ARTHUR ADAMOV
The Confession
Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.
HARUKI MURAKAMI
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running