Motivational Quotes

Suffering

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

Best Quotes about Suffering

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

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

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

Carlyle, Thomas

To perceive is to suffer.

Aristotle

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

Blackstone, Sir William

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

Hubbard, Elbert

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

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

10.

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

Henri-FrÚdÚric Amiel

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

14.

A man who suffers before it is necessary, suffers more than is necessary.

Seneca

15.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

16.

It is the lot of man to suffer.

Disraeli, Benjamin

17.

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

Lynd, Robert

18.

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

Proust, Marcel

19.

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

Helen Keller

20.

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

Donne, John

21.

Rather suffer than die is man's motto.

La Fontaine, Jean De

22.

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

23.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

24.

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

25.

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

Sontag, Susan

26.

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

Joseph Addison

27.

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

Mansfield, Katherine

28.

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

Isodore Duncan

29.

What was hard to suffer is sweet to remember.

Seneca

30.

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

31.

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

32.

Suffering is part of the divine idea.

Beecher, Henry Ward

33.

Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional.

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Oscar Wilde

37.

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

Bible

38.

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

Gurdjieff, George

39.

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

Wilde, Oscar

40.

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

Aristotle

41.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

42.

Wisdom comes alone through suffering.

Aeschylus

43.

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

Claudius

44.

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

Williams, Tennessee

45.

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

46.

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

Flack, Roberta

47.

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

48.

Who feareth to suffer suffereth already, because he feareth.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

49.

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

50.

We all choke.

Strange, Curtis