Motivational Quotes

Suffering

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

- Seneca

Best Quotes about Suffering

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

Aristotle

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

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

What was hard to suffer is sweet to remember.

Seneca

Never to suffer would never to have been blessed.

Edgar Allan Poe

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

Gurdjieff, George

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

Victor Hugo

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

Lynd, Robert

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

Helen Keller

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.

One must really have suffered oneself to help others.

Mother Teresa

12.

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

Wilde, Oscar

13.

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

Seneca

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

Claudius

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

20.

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

21.

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

22.

It is the lot of man to suffer.

Disraeli, Benjamin

23.

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

Joseph Addison

24.

Rather suffer than die is man's motto.

La Fontaine, Jean De

25.

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

Bible

26.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

27.

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

Jose Marti

28.

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

29.

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

Proust, Marcel

30.

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

Armour, Richard

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.

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

33.

To perceive is to suffer.

Aristotle

34.

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

35.

Wisdom comes alone through suffering.

Aeschylus

36.

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

Renard, Jules

37.

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.

38.

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.

39.

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

Sontag, Susan

40.

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

41.

We are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our own body, which is doomed to decay and dissolution and which cannot even do without pain and anxiety as warning signals; from the external world, which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless forces of destruction; and finally from our relations to other men. The suffering which comes from this last source is perhaps more painful than any other.

Freud, Sigmund

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.

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

Blackstone, Sir William

44.

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

Donne, John

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

Faulkner, William

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