Motivational Quotes

Suffering

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

Best Quotes about Suffering

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

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

To perceive is to suffer.

Aristotle

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

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.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

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

Renard, Jules

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

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

Proust, Marcel

10.

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

Isodore Duncan

11.

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

Mansfield, Katherine

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 part of the divine idea.

Beecher, Henry Ward

14.

We all choke.

Strange, Curtis

15.

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

Jose Marti

16.

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

17.

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

Henri-FrÚdÚric Amiel

18.

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

19.

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

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.

Great artists suffer for the people.

Gaye, Marvin

22.

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

Herodotus

23.

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

Ciardi, John

24.

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

25.

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

Williams, Tennessee

26.

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

Carrel, Alexis

27.

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

28.

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

29.

KuBler-Ross, Elisabeth

30.

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

Armour, Richard

31.

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

32.

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

Faulkner, William

33.

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

Lynd, Robert

34.

What was hard to suffer is sweet to remember.

Seneca

35.

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...

36.

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

Blackstone, Sir William

37.

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

Victor Hugo

38.

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

39.

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

Joseph Addison

40.

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

Bible

41.

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

42.

One must really have suffered oneself to help others.

Mother Teresa

43.

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

44.

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

Wilde, Oscar

45.

Wisdom comes alone through suffering.

Aeschylus

46.

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

Flack, Roberta

47.

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.

48.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

49.

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

50.

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