Motivational Quotes

Suffering

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

- Schopenhauer, Arthur

Best Quotes about Suffering

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

Blackstone, Sir William

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

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

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

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

Lynd, Robert

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

Oscar Wilde

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

Seneca

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

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

Isodore Duncan

10.

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

11.

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

Sontag, Susan

12.

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

Jose Marti

13.

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

Faulkner, William

14.

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

Claudius

15.

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

Armour, Richard

16.

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

17.

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

Victor Hugo

18.

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

19.

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.

20.

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

21.

It is the lot of man to suffer.

Disraeli, Benjamin

22.

Suffering is part of the divine idea.

Beecher, Henry Ward

23.

Great artists suffer for the people.

Gaye, Marvin

24.

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

Herodotus

25.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

26.

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

Joseph Addison

27.

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

Proust, Marcel

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

Mansfield, Katherine

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

34.

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

Aristotle

35.

Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional.

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

39.

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

40.

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

Carrel, Alexis

41.

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.

42.

Wisdom comes alone through suffering.

Aeschylus

43.

Rather suffer than die is man's motto.

La Fontaine, Jean De

44.

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

45.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

46.

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

Spurgeon, Charles Haddon

47.

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

48.

What was hard to suffer is sweet to remember.

Seneca

49.

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

Wilde, Oscar

50.

Never to suffer would never to have been blessed.

Edgar Allan Poe