Motivational Quotes

Suffering

Suffering is part of the divine idea.

- Beecher, Henry Ward

Best Quotes about Suffering

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

Aristotle

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

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

Mansfield, Katherine

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

Suffering is part of the divine idea.

Beecher, Henry Ward

Wisdom comes alone through suffering.

Aeschylus

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

Lynd, Robert

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

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

10.

Great artists suffer for the people.

Gaye, Marvin

11.

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.

12.

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

13.

It is the lot of man to suffer.

Disraeli, Benjamin

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

Donne, John

17.

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

Armour, Richard

18.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

19.

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

Claudius

20.

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

21.

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

Blackstone, Sir William

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.

Who feareth to suffer suffereth already, because he feareth.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

24.

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

25.

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

Bible

26.

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

Isodore Duncan

27.

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

Gurdjieff, George

28.

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

29.

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

Henri-FrÚdÚric Amiel

30.

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

31.

Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional.

32.

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

Williams, Tennessee

33.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

34.

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

Helen Keller

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Sontag, Susan

39.

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

Proust, Marcel

40.

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

Jose Marti

41.

Never to suffer would never to have been blessed.

Edgar Allan Poe

42.

To perceive is to suffer.

Aristotle

43.

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

44.

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

Joseph Addison

45.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

Spurgeon, Charles Haddon

50.

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

Oscar Wilde