Motivational Quotes

Suffering

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

- Jose Marti

Best Quotes about Suffering

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

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.

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

Aristotle

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

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

Blackstone, Sir William

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

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

Victor Hugo

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

Spurgeon, Charles Haddon

10.

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

Proust, Marcel

11.

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

Faulkner, William

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

15.

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

Armour, Richard

16.

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

Seneca

17.

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

18.

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

Williams, Tennessee

19.

Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional.

20.

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

Herodotus

21.

Suffering is part of the divine idea.

Beecher, Henry Ward

22.

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

Gurdjieff, George

23.

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

24.

To perceive is to suffer.

Aristotle

25.

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

Bible

26.

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

Renard, Jules

27.

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

28.

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

Carrel, Alexis

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.

Great artists suffer for the people.

Gaye, Marvin

31.

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

Flack, Roberta

32.

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

Ciardi, John

33.

Wisdom comes alone through suffering.

Aeschylus

34.

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

35.

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

Sontag, Susan

36.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

37.

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

38.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Helen Keller

43.

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

Jose Marti

44.

We all choke.

Strange, Curtis

45.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

46.

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

Donne, John

47.

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

48.

What was hard to suffer is sweet to remember.

Seneca

49.

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.

50.

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