Motivational Quotes

Suffering

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.

Best Quotes about Suffering

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

In default of inexhaustible happiness, eternal suffering would at least give us a destiny. But we do not even have that consolation, and our worst agonies come to an end one day.

Camus, Albert

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

Herodotus

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

Victor Hugo

I felt despair. Though it seems to me now there's two kinds of it: the sort that causes a person to surrender and then the sort I had which made me take risks and make plans.

Erica Eisdorfer

You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, that is something you are free to do and it accords with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could avoid.

Kafka, Franz

To perceive is to suffer.

Aristotle

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

Suffering is by no means a privilege, a sign of nobility, a reminder of God. Suffering is a fierce, bestial thing, commonplace, uncalled for, natural as air. It is intangible; no one can grasp it or fight against it; it dwells in time -- is the same thing as time; if it comes in fits and starts, that is only so as to leave the sufferer more defenseless during the moments that follow, those long moments when one relives the last bout of torture and waits for the next.

Pavese, Cesare

10.

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

Armour, Richard

11.

We all choke.

Strange, Curtis

12.

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

Bible

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

16.

Great artists suffer for the people.

Gaye, Marvin

17.

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

18.

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

Carrel, Alexis

19.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

20.

Rather suffer than die is man's motto.

La Fontaine, Jean De

21.

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

22.

Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional.

23.

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

Sontag, Susan

24.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

25.

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

Blackstone, Sir William

26.

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

Ciardi, John

27.

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

28.

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

Faulkner, William

29.

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

Flack, Roberta

30.

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

Isodore Duncan

31.

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

32.

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.

33.

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

34.

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

Seneca

35.

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

36.

In the part of this universe that we know there is great injustice, and often the good suffer, and often the wicked prosper, and one hardly knows which of those is the more annoying.

Bertrand Russell

37.

What was hard to suffer is sweet to remember.

Seneca

38.

I have suffered too much in this world not to hope for another.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

39.

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

Proust, Marcel

40.

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

41.

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...

42.

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

Henri-FrÚdÚric Amiel

43.

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

Williams, Tennessee

44.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

45.

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

Mansfield, Katherine

46.

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

47.

One must really have suffered oneself to help others.

Mother Teresa

48.

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

Donne, John

49.

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

Gurdjieff, George

50.

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