Motivational Quotes

Suffering

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

Best Quotes about Suffering

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

Helen Keller

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

Williams, Tennessee

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

One must really have suffered oneself to help others.

Mother Teresa

Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional.

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

Renard, Jules

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

Lynd, Robert

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.

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

Ciardi, John

10.

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

Herodotus

11.

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...

12.

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

Joseph Addison

13.

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

14.

Never to suffer would never to have been blessed.

Edgar Allan Poe

15.

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

16.

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

17.

Wisdom comes alone through suffering.

Aeschylus

18.

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

19.

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

Faulkner, William

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

23.

Suffering is part of the divine idea.

Beecher, Henry Ward

24.

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

25.

Thomas Merton

26.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

27.

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

Proust, Marcel

28.

It is the lot of man to suffer.

Disraeli, Benjamin

29.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Sontag, Susan

34.

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

Donne, John

35.

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

Aristotle

36.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

37.

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

Armour, Richard

38.

Who feareth to suffer suffereth already, because he feareth.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

39.

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

40.

What was hard to suffer is sweet to remember.

Seneca

41.

To perceive is to suffer.

Aristotle

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Henri-FrÚdÚric Amiel

45.

Great artists suffer for the people.

Gaye, Marvin

46.

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

Spurgeon, Charles Haddon

47.

Rather suffer than die is man's motto.

La Fontaine, Jean De

48.

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

Jose Marti

49.

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

50.

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

Mansfield, Katherine