Motivational Quotes

Suffering

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

- Rousseau, Jean Jacques

Best Quotes about Suffering

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

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

Oscar Wilde

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

Williams, Tennessee

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

Carrel, Alexis

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...

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

Seneca

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

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

Faulkner, William

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

10.

Suffering is part of the divine idea.

Beecher, Henry Ward

11.

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

12.

Never to suffer would never to have been blessed.

Edgar Allan Poe

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Bible

16.

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

Henri-FrÚdÚric Amiel

17.

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

Donne, John

18.

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

Victor Hugo

19.

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

Helen Keller

20.

What was hard to suffer is sweet to remember.

Seneca

21.

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

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

Herodotus

24.

Who feareth to suffer suffereth already, because he feareth.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

25.

Rather suffer than die is man's motto.

La Fontaine, Jean De

26.

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

Proust, Marcel

27.

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

28.

So long as little children are allowed to suffer, there is no true love in this world.

Isodore Duncan

29.

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

Armour, Richard

30.

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

Blackstone, Sir William

31.

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

32.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

33.

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

Aristotle

34.

Wisdom comes alone through suffering.

Aeschylus

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Wilde, Oscar

39.

Great artists suffer for the people.

Gaye, Marvin

40.

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

Mansfield, Katherine

41.

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

42.

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

Flack, Roberta

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.

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

45.

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

46.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

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.

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

49.

We all choke.

Strange, Curtis

50.

One must really have suffered oneself to help others.

Mother Teresa