Motivational Quotes

Suffering

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

- Donne, John

Best Quotes about Suffering

We all choke.

Strange, Curtis

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

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

Ciardi, John

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

Seneca

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

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

Sontag, Susan

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

Claudius

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

Gurdjieff, George

Wisdom comes alone through suffering.

Aeschylus

10.

Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional.

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

15.

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

Bible

16.

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

17.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

18.

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

Wilde, Oscar

19.

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

20.

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

21.

What was hard to suffer is sweet to remember.

Seneca

22.

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

Victor Hugo

23.

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

Aristotle

24.

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

25.

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

Williams, Tennessee

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

29.

Suffering is part of the divine idea.

Beecher, Henry Ward

30.

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

31.

Rather suffer than die is man's motto.

La Fontaine, Jean De

32.

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

33.

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

Carrel, Alexis

34.

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...

35.

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

Lynd, Robert

36.

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

Renard, Jules

37.

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

Blackstone, Sir William

38.

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

Herodotus

39.

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

Donne, John

40.

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

Proust, Marcel

41.

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

Henri-FrÚdÚric Amiel

42.

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

Oscar Wilde

43.

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.

44.

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

45.

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

46.

It is the lot of man to suffer.

Disraeli, Benjamin

47.

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

48.

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

Mansfield, Katherine

49.

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

50.

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

Carlyle, Thomas