Motivational Quotes

Suffering

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

- Rousseau, Jean Jacques

Best Quotes about Suffering

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...

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

Blackstone, Sir William

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

To perceive is to suffer.

Aristotle

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

Carrel, Alexis

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

Henri-FrÚdÚric Amiel

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

Mansfield, Katherine

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

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

10.

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

11.

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.

12.

Who feareth to suffer suffereth already, because he feareth.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

13.

Great artists suffer for the people.

Gaye, Marvin

14.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

15.

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

Claudius

16.

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

17.

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

Aristotle

18.

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

19.

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

Oscar Wilde

20.

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

21.

One must really have suffered oneself to help others.

Mother Teresa

22.

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

Faulkner, William

23.

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

Seneca

24.

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

Ciardi, John

25.

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

Herodotus

26.

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

27.

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

Spurgeon, Charles Haddon

28.

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

Renard, Jules

29.

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

Helen Keller

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Wilde, Oscar

33.

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

Donne, John

34.

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

Williams, Tennessee

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

Gurdjieff, George

43.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

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 suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades.

Sontag, Susan

46.

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

Jose Marti

47.

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.

48.

Rather suffer than die is man's motto.

La Fontaine, Jean De

49.

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

50.

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

Bible