Motivational Quotes

Suffering

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

Best Quotes about Suffering

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

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

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

Seneca

Wisdom comes alone through suffering.

Aeschylus

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

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

Henri-FrÚdÚric Amiel

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

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

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

10.

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

Carrel, Alexis

11.

To perceive is to suffer.

Aristotle

12.

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

13.

Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional.

14.

Suffering is part of the divine idea.

Beecher, Henry Ward

15.

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

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.

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

Claudius

18.

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

19.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

20.

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

21.

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

22.

It is the lot of man to suffer.

Disraeli, Benjamin

23.

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

Bible

24.

Never to suffer would never to have been blessed.

Edgar Allan Poe

25.

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.

26.

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

Ciardi, John

27.

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

Gurdjieff, George

28.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

29.

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

30.

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

Helen Keller

31.

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

32.

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

Aristotle

33.

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

Mansfield, Katherine

34.

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

Sontag, Susan

35.

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...

36.

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

Isodore Duncan

37.

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

Blackstone, Sir William

38.

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

Faulkner, William

39.

Who feareth to suffer suffereth already, because he feareth.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Spurgeon, Charles Haddon

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.

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.

46.

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

Jose Marti

47.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Armour, Richard