Motivational Quotes

Suffering

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

- Helen Keller

Best Quotes about 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

It is the lot of man to suffer.

Disraeli, Benjamin

Great artists suffer for the people.

Gaye, Marvin

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

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

Oscar Wilde

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

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

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

Wisdom comes alone through suffering.

Aeschylus

10.

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...

11.

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

Wilde, Oscar

12.

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

Renard, Jules

13.

Never to suffer would never to have been blessed.

Edgar Allan Poe

14.

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

Flack, Roberta

15.

Rather suffer than die is man's motto.

La Fontaine, Jean De

16.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

17.

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

Donne, John

18.

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

19.

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

Armour, Richard

20.

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

Victor Hugo

21.

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

Herodotus

22.

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

Joseph Addison

23.

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

Faulkner, William

24.

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

Helen Keller

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

Ciardi, John

29.

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

30.

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.

31.

Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional.

32.

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

Aristotle

33.

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

Jose Marti

34.

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

Carrel, Alexis

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

Proust, Marcel

38.

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

39.

We all choke.

Strange, Curtis

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

Mansfield, Katherine

43.

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

44.

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

Williams, Tennessee

45.

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

Lynd, Robert

46.

Who feareth to suffer suffereth already, because he feareth.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

47.

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

Seneca

48.

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

49.

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

Blackstone, Sir William

50.

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