Motivational Quotes

Suffering

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

- Victor Hugo

Best Quotes about Suffering

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

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

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

Flack, Roberta

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

Hubbard, Elbert

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

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

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

Seneca

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

Ciardi, John

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

Joseph Addison

10.

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...

11.

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

Bible

12.

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

Blackstone, Sir William

13.

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

Helen Keller

14.

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

Isodore Duncan

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.

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

Williams, Tennessee

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Spurgeon, Charles Haddon

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 cold in the head causes less suffering than an idea.

Renard, Jules

23.

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

Aristotle

24.

It is the lot of man to suffer.

Disraeli, Benjamin

25.

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

26.

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

Oscar Wilde

27.

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

Carrel, Alexis

28.

One must really have suffered oneself to help others.

Mother Teresa

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Sontag, Susan

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Claudius

36.

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

37.

Wisdom comes alone through suffering.

Aeschylus

38.

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

Jose Marti

39.

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

Faulkner, William

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

44.

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.

45.

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

Mansfield, Katherine

46.

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

Herodotus

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.

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

Gurdjieff, George

49.

Great artists suffer for the people.

Gaye, Marvin

50.

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

Armour, Richard