Motivational Quotes

Suffering

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

- Henri-FrÚdÚric Amiel

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

We all choke.

Strange, Curtis

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

Joseph Addison

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

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

Bible

Who feareth to suffer suffereth already, because he feareth.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

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

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

Faulkner, William

Never to suffer would never to have been blessed.

Edgar Allan Poe

10.

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

Isodore Duncan

11.

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

Spurgeon, Charles Haddon

12.

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

Flack, Roberta

13.

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

14.

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

15.

What was hard to suffer is sweet to remember.

Seneca

16.

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

Gurdjieff, George

17.

One must really have suffered oneself to help others.

Mother Teresa

18.

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

Ciardi, John

19.

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

Blackstone, Sir William

20.

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

Oscar Wilde

21.

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

Jose Marti

22.

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

23.

Rather suffer than die is man's motto.

La Fontaine, Jean De

24.

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

Carrel, Alexis

25.

Wisdom comes alone through suffering.

Aeschylus

26.

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

Claudius

27.

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

28.

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...

29.

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.

30.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

31.

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

32.

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

Herodotus

33.

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

34.

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

35.

Although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it.

Helen Keller

36.

It is the lot of man to suffer.

Disraeli, Benjamin

37.

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

Sontag, Susan

38.

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

Lynd, Robert

39.

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

40.

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

Aristotle

41.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

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.

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

44.

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

Wilde, Oscar

45.

Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional.

46.

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

Williams, Tennessee

47.

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

Donne, John

48.

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

Armour, Richard

49.

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

50.

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