Motivational Quotes

Suffering

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

- Seneca

Best Quotes about Suffering

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

Jose Marti

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

Gurdjieff, George

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

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

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

Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional.

Never to suffer would never to have been blessed.

Edgar Allan Poe

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

Williams, Tennessee

One must really have suffered oneself to help others.

Mother Teresa

10.

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

11.

We all choke.

Strange, Curtis

12.

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

Carrel, Alexis

13.

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

Isodore Duncan

14.

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.

15.

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

16.

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

Aristotle

17.

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

Proust, Marcel

18.

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

Sontag, Susan

19.

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

20.

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

Faulkner, William

21.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

22.

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

23.

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.

24.

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

Renard, Jules

25.

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...

26.

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

Helen Keller

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Oscar Wilde

33.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

34.

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

Armour, Richard

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

Flack, Roberta

40.

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

Herodotus

41.

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

Donne, John

42.

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

Henri-FrÚdÚric Amiel

43.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

44.

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

45.

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

Bible

46.

Who feareth to suffer suffereth already, because he feareth.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

47.

Great artists suffer for the people.

Gaye, Marvin

48.

Suffering is part of the divine idea.