Motivational Quotes

Suffering

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

- Flack, Roberta

Best Quotes about Suffering

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

Rather suffer than die is man's motto.

La Fontaine, Jean De

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

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

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

Never to suffer would never to have been blessed.

Edgar Allan Poe

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

Ciardi, John

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

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

Bible

10.

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

Donne, John

11.

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.

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

15.

It is the lot of man to suffer.

Disraeli, Benjamin

16.

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

Flack, Roberta

17.

What was hard to suffer is sweet to remember.

Seneca

18.

One must really have suffered oneself to help others.

Mother Teresa

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Proust, Marcel

22.

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

Gurdjieff, George

23.

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

24.

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

Jose Marti

25.

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

Carrel, Alexis

26.

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

Faulkner, William

27.

Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional.

28.

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

Wilde, Oscar

29.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

30.

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

Herodotus

31.

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

Claudius

32.

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

Aristotle

33.

Great artists suffer for the people.

Gaye, Marvin

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Lynd, Robert

37.

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

38.

We all choke.

Strange, Curtis

39.

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

40.

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.

41.

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

Mansfield, Katherine

42.

Wisdom comes alone through suffering.

Aeschylus

43.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

44.

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

45.

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

Oscar Wilde

46.

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

Spurgeon, Charles Haddon

47.

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

Isodore Duncan

48.

To perceive is to suffer.

Aristotle

49.

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

50.

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