Motivational Quotes

Suffering

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

Famous Inspirational Daily Quotes

Best Quotes about Suffering

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

Never to suffer would never to have been blessed.

Edgar Allan Poe

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

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

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

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

Herodotus

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

Faulkner, William

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.

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

Sontag, Susan

10.

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

Donne, John

11.

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

Williams, Tennessee

12.

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

13.

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

Ciardi, John

14.

Wisdom comes alone through suffering.

Aeschylus

15.

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

Gurdjieff, George

16.

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

Proust, Marcel

17.

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

18.

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

Blackstone, Sir William

19.

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...

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.

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

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Lynd, Robert

25.

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

Renard, Jules

26.

To perceive is to suffer.

Aristotle

27.

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

Aristotle

28.

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.

29.

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

Claudius

30.

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

31.

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

Bible

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Mansfield, Katherine

35.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

36.

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

Jose Marti

37.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

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.

Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional.

43.

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

Helen Keller

44.

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

45.

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

46.

Great artists suffer for the people.

Gaye, Marvin

47.

What was hard to suffer is sweet to remember.

Seneca

48.

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

Seneca

49.

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