Motivational Quotes

Suffering

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

- Mansfield, Katherine

Best Quotes about Suffering

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

Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional.

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

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

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

Flack, Roberta

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

Ciardi, John

Suffering is part of the divine idea.

Beecher, Henry Ward

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

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

Gurdjieff, George

10.

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

Armour, Richard

11.

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...

12.

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

Aristotle

13.

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

Blackstone, Sir William

14.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

Joseph Addison

18.

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

Carrel, Alexis

19.

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

Oscar Wilde

20.

Rather suffer than die is man's motto.

La Fontaine, Jean De

21.

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

22.

Wisdom comes alone through suffering.

Aeschylus

23.

What was hard to suffer is sweet to remember.

Seneca

24.

It is the lot of man to suffer.

Disraeli, Benjamin

25.

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

Donne, John

26.

We all choke.

Strange, Curtis

27.

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

Bible

28.

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

Herodotus

29.

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

Lynd, Robert

30.

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

31.

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

Mansfield, Katherine

32.

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

33.

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

Jose Marti

34.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

35.

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

Henri-FrÚdÚric Amiel

36.

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

Spurgeon, Charles Haddon

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

Seneca

40.

Never to suffer would never to have been blessed.

Edgar Allan Poe

41.

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

42.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

43.

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.

44.

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

45.

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

Claudius

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.

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

Sontag, Susan

48.

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

49.

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

Renard, Jules

50.

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