Motivational Quotes

Suffering

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

- Herodotus

Best Quotes about Suffering

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

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

Rather suffer than die is man's motto.

La Fontaine, Jean De

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

Armour, Richard

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

Helen Keller

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

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

Great artists suffer for the people.

Gaye, Marvin

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

Wilde, Oscar

10.

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

11.

Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional.

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

16.

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

17.

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

Isodore Duncan

18.

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

Renard, Jules

19.

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

20.

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

Gurdjieff, George

21.

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

Joseph Addison

22.

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

Faulkner, William

23.

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

Williams, Tennessee

24.

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

Mansfield, Katherine

25.

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

26.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

27.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

28.

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.

29.

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

Oscar Wilde

30.

Never to suffer would never to have been blessed.

Edgar Allan Poe

31.

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

Henri-FrÚdÚric Amiel

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

35.

We all choke.

Strange, Curtis

36.

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

Aristotle

37.

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

Lynd, Robert

38.

To perceive is to suffer.

Aristotle

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

43.

Suffering is part of the divine idea.

Beecher, Henry Ward

44.

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

Bible

45.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

46.

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

Ciardi, John

47.

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

48.

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

Victor Hugo

49.

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

50.

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