Motivational Quotes

Suffering

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

Best Quotes about Suffering

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

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

Hubbard, Elbert

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

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

Herodotus

Suffering is part of the divine idea.

Beecher, Henry Ward

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

Williams, Tennessee

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

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

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

10.

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

Proust, Marcel

11.

It is the lot of man to suffer.

Disraeli, Benjamin

12.

Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional.

13.

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

Mansfield, Katherine

14.

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

15.

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.

16.

Rather suffer than die is man's motto.

La Fontaine, Jean De

17.

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

18.

To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.

Flack, Roberta

19.

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

Armour, Richard

20.

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

Henri-FrÚdÚric Amiel

21.

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...

22.

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

Jose Marti

23.

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

Gurdjieff, George

24.

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

25.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

26.

We all choke.

Strange, Curtis

27.

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

Ciardi, John

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

Blackstone, Sir William

32.

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

Victor Hugo

33.

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

34.

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

Helen Keller

35.

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

Bible

36.

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

37.

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

Aristotle

38.

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

Seneca

39.

To perceive is to suffer.

Aristotle

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

43.

Man cannot remake himself without suffering, for he is both the marble and the sculptor.

Carrel, Alexis

44.

Wisdom comes alone through suffering.

Aeschylus

45.

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

Faulkner, William

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

Oscar Wilde

50.

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

Donne, John