Motivational Quotes

Suffering

Suffering becomes beautiful when anyone bears great calamities with cheerfulness, not through insensibility but through greatness of mind.

- Aristotle

Best Quotes about Suffering

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

Seneca

A cold in the head causes less suffering than an idea.

Renard, Jules

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

Mansfield, Katherine

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

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

Carrel, Alexis

You are outside life, you are above life, you have miseries which the ordinary man does not know, you exceed the normal level, and it is for this that men refuse to forgive you, you poison their peace of mind, you undermine their stability. You have irrepressible pains whose essence is to be inadaptable to any known state, indescribable in words. You have repeated and shifting pains, incurable pains, pains beyond imagining, pains which are neither of the body nor of the soul, but which partake of both. And I share your suffering, and I ask you: who dares to ration our relief? We are not going to kill ourselves just yet. In the meantime, leave us the hell alone.

Artaud, Antonin

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

Carlyle, Thomas

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

Ciardi, John

We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it in full.

Proust, Marcel

10.

What was hard to suffer is sweet to remember.

Seneca

11.

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

12.

One must really have suffered oneself to help others.

Mother Teresa

13.

Wisdom comes alone through suffering.

Aeschylus

14.

It is the lot of man to suffer.

Disraeli, Benjamin

15.

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

16.

Suffering is the ancient law of love; there is not quest without pain; there is no lover who is not also a martyr.

Suso, Heinrich

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Spurgeon, Charles Haddon

20.

To perceive is to suffer.

Aristotle

21.

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

Donne, John

22.

Who feareth to suffer suffereth already, because he feareth.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

23.

There is not much sense in suffering, since drugs can be given for pain, itching, and other discomforts. The belief has long died that suffering here on earth will be rewarded in heaven. Suffering has lost its meaning.

KuBler-Ross, Elisabeth

24.

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

25.

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.

26.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

27.

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

Claudius

28.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

29.

The afflicted are not listened to. They are like someone whose tongue has been cut out and who occasionally forgets the fact. When they move their lips no ear perceives any sound. And they themselves soon sink into impotence in the use of language, because of the certainty of not being heard.

Weil, Simone

30.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

31.

If suffer we must, let's suffer on the heights.

Victor Hugo

32.

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

33.

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

34.

Suffering is part of the divine idea.

Beecher, Henry Ward

35.

It is good for me that I was afflicted that I may learn Thy statutes. [Psalms 119:71]

Bible

36.

Oh, fear not in a world like this, and thou shalt know erelong, know how sublime a thing it is to suffer and be strong.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

37.

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

Joseph Addison

38.

It is a glorious thing to be indifferent to suffering, but only to one's own suffering.

Lynd, Robert

39.

It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades.

Sontag, Susan

40.

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

41.

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

Jose Marti

42.

But penance need not be paid in suffering...It can be paid in forward motion. Correcting the mistake is a positive move, a nurturing move.

Barbara Hall

43.

Crying is the refuge of plain women, but the ruin of pretty ones.

Oscar Wilde

44.

We all choke.

Strange, Curtis

45.

To become a spectator of one's own life is to escape the suffering of life.

Wilde, Oscar

46.

Great artists suffer for the people.

Gaye, Marvin

47.

If you learn from your suffering, and really come to understand the lesson you were taught, you might be able to help someone else who's now in the phase you may have just completed. Maybe that's what it's all about after all...

48.

Rather suffer than die is man's motto.

La Fontaine, Jean De

49.

Every age, every culture, every custom and tradition has its own character, its own weakness and its own strength, its beauties and cruelties; it accepts certain sufferings as matters of course, puts up patiently with certain evils. Human life is reduced to real suffering, to hell, only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap.

Hesse, Hermann

50.

The worst part a man can suffer is to have insight into much and power over nothing.

Herodotus