Motivational Quotes

Suffering

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

Best Quotes about Suffering

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

Mansfield, Katherine

It is the lot of man to suffer.

Disraeli, Benjamin

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

Proust, Marcel

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

Blackstone, Sir William

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

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

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

Williams, Tennessee

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

Great artists suffer for the people.

Gaye, Marvin

10.

Wisdom comes alone through suffering.

Aeschylus

11.

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

12.

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

Armour, Richard

13.

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

Gurdjieff, George

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.

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

16.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

20.

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

Aristotle

21.

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

22.

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

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.

We all choke.

Strange, Curtis

25.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

26.

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

Carrel, Alexis

27.

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

Renard, Jules

28.

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

29.

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

Herodotus

30.

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

Victor Hugo

31.

One must really have suffered oneself to help others.

Mother Teresa

32.

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

33.

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

Flack, Roberta

34.

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...

35.

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

Spurgeon, Charles Haddon

36.

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.

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

Helen Keller

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.

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

Joseph Addison

42.

Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional.

43.

Kafka, Franz

44.

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

45.

What was hard to suffer is sweet to remember.

Seneca

46.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

47.

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

Faulkner, William

48.

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