Motivational Quotes

Suffering

Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional.

Famous Inspirational Daily Quotes

Best Quotes about Suffering

Naked I came from my mother's womb, and naked I shall return there. The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away blessed be the name of the Lord.

Bible

Rather suffer than die is man's motto.

La Fontaine, Jean De

Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise.

Orwell, George

The truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering the more you suffer because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you in proportion to your fear of being hurt.

Thomas Merton

To choose a hardship for ourselves is our only defense against that hardship. This is what is meant by accepting suffering. Those who, by their very nature, can suffer completely, utterly, have an advantage. That is how we can disarm the power of suffering, make it our own creation, our own choice; submit to it. A justification for suicide.

Pavese, Cesare

To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.

Flack, Roberta

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

Is suffering so very serious? I have come to doubt it. It may be quite childish, a sort of undignified pastime -- I'm referring to the kind of suffering a man inflicts on a woman or a woman on a man. It's extremely painful. I agree that it's hardly bearable. But I very much fear that this sort of pain deserves no consideration at all. It's no more worthy of respect than old age or illness.

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

It is by a wise economy of nature that those who suffer without change, and whom no one can help, become uninteresting. Yet so it may happen that those who need sympathy the most often attract it the least.

Bradley, Francis H.

10.

I have not yet met with a sorrow that could not be borne, nor with one who's passing did not leave me stronger.

Kathryn L. Nelson

11.

Great artists suffer for the people.

Gaye, Marvin

12.

You can't drown your sorrows, they always float to the surface.

13.

For suffering and enduring there is no remedy, but striving and doing.

Carlyle, Thomas

14.

If you suffer, thank God! It is a sure sign that you are alive.

Hubbard, Elbert

15.

You desire to know the art of living, my friend? It is contained in one phrase: make use of suffering.

Henri-FrÚdÚric Amiel

16.

We all choke.

Strange, Curtis

17.

So long as little children are allowed to suffer, there is no true love in this world.

Isodore Duncan

18.

The salvation of the world is in man's suffering.

Faulkner, William

19.

I have found that it don't really matter if you're brought up fine or rough, but that it helps to have someone to spill your sorrows to.

Erica Eisdorfer

20.

Suffering is part of the divine idea.

Beecher, Henry Ward

21.

It is better that ten guilty persons escape than one innocent suffer

Blackstone, Sir William

22.

I've suffered from all of the hang-ups known, and none is as bad as the telephone.

Armour, Richard

23.

A man will renounce any pleasures you like but he will not give up his suffering.

Gurdjieff, George

24.

What was hard to suffer is sweet to remember.

Seneca

25.

Affliction is a treasure, and scarce any man hath enough of it.

Donne, John

26.

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 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.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott

27.

Without out suffering, our work would just be social work, very good and helpful, but it would not be the work of Jesus Christ, not part of the Redemption. All the desolation of the poor people, not only their material poverty, but their spiritual destitution, must be redeemed. And we must share it, for only by being one with them can we redeem them by bringing God into their lives and bringing them to God.

Mother Teresa

28.

We are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our own body, which is doomed to decay and dissolution and which cannot even do without pain and anxiety as warning signals; from the external world, which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless forces of destruction; and finally from our relations to other men. The suffering which comes from this last source is perhaps more painful than any other.

Freud, Sigmund

29.

There is no true love save in suffering, and in this world we have to choose either love, which is suffering, or happiness. Man is the more man -- that is, the more divine -- the greater his capacity for suffering, or rather, for anguish.

Unamuno, Miguel De

30.

Man has to suffer. When he has no real afflictions, he invents some.

Jose Marti

31.

One must really have suffered oneself to help others.

Mother Teresa

32.

A misery is not to be measured from the nature of the evil, but from the temper of the sufferer.

Joseph Addison

33.

What really raises one's indignation against suffering is not suffering intrinsically, but the senselessness of suffering.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

34.

To perceive is to suffer.

Aristotle

35.

But a somewhat more liberal and sympathetic examination of mankind will convince us that the cross is even older than the gibbet, that voluntary suffering was before and independent of compulsory; and in short that in most important matters a man has always been free to ruin himself if he chose.

G. K. Chesterton

36.

Everything in life that we really accept undergoes a change. So suffering must become Love. That is the mystery.

Mansfield, Katherine

37.

You do not have to suffer to be a poet. Adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.

Ciardi, John

38.

How little it takes to make life unbearable: a pebble in the shoe, a cockroach in the spaghetti, a woman's laugh.

Mencken, H. L.

39.

Don't look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes you'll know you're dead.

Williams, Tennessee

40.

No one is more miserable than the person who wills everything and can do nothing.

Claudius

41.

A man who suffers before it is necessary, suffers more than is necessary.

Seneca

42.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

43.

Who feareth to suffer suffereth already, because he feareth.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

44.

Man cannot remake himself without suffering, for he is both the marble and the sculptor.

Carrel, Alexis

45.

No one is so miserable as the poor person who maintains the appearance of wealth.

Spurgeon, Charles Haddon

46.

Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional.