Motivational Quotes

Suffering

Wisdom comes alone through suffering.

- Aeschylus

Best Quotes about Suffering

Suffering is part of the divine idea.

Beecher, Henry Ward

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

Never to suffer would never to have been blessed.

Edgar Allan Poe

Great artists suffer for the people.

Gaye, Marvin

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

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

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

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

Aristotle

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

Faulkner, William

10.

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

Blackstone, Sir William

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Flack, Roberta

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

Mansfield, Katherine

17.

One must really have suffered oneself to help others.

Mother Teresa

18.

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

19.

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

Lynd, Robert

20.

Who feareth to suffer suffereth already, because he feareth.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

21.

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

22.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

23.

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

Sontag, Susan

24.

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

25.

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

Armour, Richard

26.

To perceive is to suffer.

Aristotle

27.

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

28.

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

Oscar Wilde

29.

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

Seneca

30.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

31.

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

32.

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.

33.

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

Claudius

34.

Wisdom comes alone through suffering.

Aeschylus

35.

It is the lot of man to suffer.

Disraeli, Benjamin

36.

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

37.

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

Jose Marti

38.

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

Wilde, Oscar

39.

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

Helen Keller

40.

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

41.

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

42.

We all choke.

Strange, Curtis

43.

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

Proust, Marcel

44.

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

Williams, Tennessee

45.

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

46.

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

Henri-FrÚdÚric Amiel

47.

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

48.

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

Victor Hugo

49.

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

50.

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