Motivational Quotes

Suffering

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

- Spurgeon, Charles Haddon

Best Quotes about Suffering

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

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

Victor Hugo

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

Renard, Jules

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

Ciardi, John

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

Claudius

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

Blackstone, Sir William

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

Aristotle

To perceive is to suffer.

Aristotle

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

10.

What was hard to suffer is sweet to remember.

Seneca

11.

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

12.

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

Spurgeon, Charles Haddon

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.

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

Isodore Duncan

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

19.

Who feareth to suffer suffereth already, because he feareth.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

Sontag, Susan

24.

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

Gurdjieff, George

25.

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

Armour, Richard

26.

Suffering is part of the divine idea.

Beecher, Henry Ward

27.

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

Proust, Marcel

28.

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

Herodotus

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Donne, John

34.

One must really have suffered oneself to help others.

Mother Teresa

35.

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

Wilde, Oscar

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Jose Marti

39.

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

40.

Rather suffer than die is man's motto.

La Fontaine, Jean De

41.

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

42.

Great artists suffer for the people.

Gaye, Marvin

43.

It is the lot of man to suffer.

Disraeli, Benjamin

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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.

47.

Never to suffer would never to have been blessed.

Edgar Allan Poe

48.

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

Henri-FrÚdÚric Amiel

49.

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

50.

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...