Motivational Quotes

Suffering

We all choke.

- Strange, Curtis

Best Quotes about Suffering

What was hard to suffer is sweet to remember.

Seneca

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

Lynd, Robert

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.

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

Suffering is part of the divine idea.

Beecher, Henry Ward

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

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

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

Joseph Addison

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

Renard, Jules

10.

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

11.

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

Helen Keller

12.

Rather suffer than die is man's motto.

La Fontaine, Jean De

13.

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

Bible

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

Wilde, Oscar

17.

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.

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.

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

20.

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

Claudius

21.

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

Victor Hugo

22.

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

Spurgeon, Charles Haddon

23.

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

24.

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

Donne, John

25.

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

26.

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

Gurdjieff, George

27.

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

Oscar Wilde

28.

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

29.

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

Blackstone, Sir William

30.

Who feareth to suffer suffereth already, because he feareth.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

31.

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

32.

To perceive is to suffer.

Aristotle

33.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

34.

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

Proust, Marcel

35.

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

36.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

37.

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

Jose Marti

38.

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

Faulkner, William

39.

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

Williams, Tennessee

40.

Never to suffer would never to have been blessed.

Edgar Allan Poe

41.

One must really have suffered oneself to help others.

Mother Teresa

42.

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

Mansfield, Katherine

43.

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

Henri-FrÚdÚric Amiel

44.

It is the lot of man to suffer.

Disraeli, Benjamin

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Armour, Richard

48.

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

Seneca

49.

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

50.

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

Carrel, Alexis