quotations about suffering
When sufferings become unendurable the cries are no longer heard. The cries, too, fall like rain in summer.
BERTOLT BRECHT
"When Evil-Doing Comes Like Falling Rain"
Suffering is a lesson the Soul needs in order to get to its Beloved. Joy is too.
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
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"
As long as one suffers one lives.
GRAHAM GREENE
The End of the Affair
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
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
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
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
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
Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seamed with scars.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
Fire tests gold, suffering tests brave men.
LATIN PROVERB
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"
Let a man live but two or three years without Affliction, and he is almost good for nothing.
WELLINS CALCOTT
Thoughts Moral and Divine
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
Suffering is not increased by numbers; one body can contain all the suffering the world can feel.
GRAHAM GREENE
The Quiet American
The wound is the place where light enters you.
RUMI
attributed, Wild Essence: Return to the Peace & Freedom of Your Inner Wilderness
Suffering is dysfunctional, except as a bodily warning against danger. Psychologically and socially it's merely destructive.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Dispossessed
Still to the sufferer comes, as due from God, a glory that to suffering owes its birth.
AESCHYLUS
fragment
Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.
HARUKI MURAKAMI
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running