suffering Quotes

“Suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but - I hope - into a better shape.”

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”

“Beauty, youth, good fortune, even love itself, cannot keep care and pain, loss and sorrow, from the most blessed for...into each life some rain must fall, some days must be dark and sad and dreary.”

“And O there are days in this life, worth life and worth death.”

“I have learned now that while those who speak about one’s miseries usually hurt, those who keep silence hurt more.”

“For with eyes made clear by many tears, and a heart softened by the tenderest sorrow, she recognized the beauty of her sister’s life--uneventful, unambitious, yet full of the genuine virtues which ‘smell sweet, and blossom in the dust’, the self-forgetfulness that makes the humblest on earth remembered soonest in heaven, the true success which is possible to all. ”

“The more we diminish our own pain, or rank it compared to what others have survived, the less empathetic we are to everyone.”

“An experience of collective pain does not deliver us from grief or sadness; it is a ministry of presence. These moments remind us that we are not alone in our darkness and that our broken heart is connected to every heart that has known pain since the beginning of time.”

“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 of 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.”

“Why joys so scantily disburse, Why Paradise defer, Why floods are served to us in bowls,— I speculate no more.”

“For each ecstatic instant We must an anguish pay In keen and quivering ratio To the ecstasy.”

“I am not used to Hope — It might intrude upon — Its sweet parade — blaspheme the place — Ordained to Suffering —”

“Sometimes I think God is trying to test me, both now and in the future. I’ll have to become a good person on my own, without anyone to serve as a model or advise me, but it’ll make me stronger in the end.”

“If I had read all this in a book, Harry, I think I would have wept over it. Somehow, now that it has happened actually, and to me, it seems far too wonderful for tears.”

“I, the miserable and the abandoned, am an abortion, to be spurned at, and kicked, and trampled on.”

“I am malicious because I am miserable. Am I not shunned and hated by all mankind?”

“As I fixed my eyes on the child, I saw something glittering on his breast. I took it; it was a portrait of a most lovely woman. In spite of my malignity, it softened and attracted me. For a few moments I gazed with delight on her dark eyes, fringed by deep lashes, and her lovely lips; but presently my rage returned; I remembered that I was forever deprived of the delights that such beautiful creatures could bestow and that she whose resemblance I contemplated would, in regarding me, have changed that air of divine benignity to one expressive of disgust and affright.”

“Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second’s encounter with God and with eternity.”

They were eyes no longer, but had become those fathomless mirrors which in men who have known the depths of suffering may replace the conscious gaze, so that they no longer see reality but reflect the memory of past events.

“There is a secret medicine given only to those who hurt so hard they can’t hope.”

“Without pain, how could we know joy?′ This is an old argument in the field of thinking about suffering and its stupidity and lack of sophistication could be plumbed for centuries but suffice it to say that the existence of broccoli does not, in any way, affect the taste of chocolate.”

“I hated hurting him. Most of the time, I could forget about it, but the inexorable truth is this: They might be glad to have me around, but I was the alpha and the omega of my parents’ suffering.”

“Without the frown of clouds and lightning, the vines would be burned by the smiling sun.”

“Let me take a moment to tell those of you who are dealing with and fighting through something painful: it is a miracle that you’re sitting here. You are nobly doing your best to battle your way through it. You are a warrior because of the trials you are going through, but don’t you dare squander the strength you have earned just because the acquisition of it was painful.”

“Everyone was so kind. Strong, too. In the darkest days, the Lord puts the best people into your life.”

“Augustus nodded at the screen. ‘Pain demands to be felt,’ he said, which was a line from An Imperial Affliction.”

“It takes ten times as long to put yourself back together as it does to fall apart.”

“Her hazel eyes seemed to have experienced all possible tragedy and to have mounted pain and suffering like steps into a high calm and a superhuman understanding.”

Man cannot possess anything as long as he fears death. But to him who does not fear it, everything belongs. If there was no suffering, man would not know his limits, would not know himself.

“Keep in mind that many people have died for their beliefs; it’s actually quite common. The real courage is in living and suffering for what you believe.”

“You must suffer me to go my own dark way.”

“The last few hours were certainly very painful,” replied Anne: “but when pain is over, the remembrance of it often becomes a pleasure. One does not love a place the less for having suffered in it, unless it has been all suffering, nothing but suffering-”

“If I am the chief of sinners, I am the chief of sufferers also.”

“No man knows till he has suffered from the night how sweet and dear to his heart and eye the morning can be.”

“Our friend Tom, in his own simple musings, often compared his more fortunate lot, in the bondage into which he was cast, with that of Joseph in Egypt; and, in fact, as time went on, and he developed more and more under the eye of his master, the strength of the parallel increased.”

“But a mermaid has no tears, and therefore she suffers so much more.”

“We call them dumb animals, and so they are, for they cannot tell us how they feel, but they do not suffer less because they have no words.”

“Everyone suffers, even the good Lord suffered when he was on Earth.”

“Suffer love,--a good epithet! I do suffer love indeed, for I love thee against my will.”

And the more I drink the more I feel it. That’s why I drink too. I try to find sympathy and feeling in drink.... I drink so that I may suffer twice as much!

“Me miserable! which way shall I flie Infinite wrauth, and infinite despaire? Which way I flie is Hell; my self am Hell; And in the lowest deep a lower deep Still threatning to devour me opens wide, To which the Hell I suffer seems a Heav’n.”

“What dost thou know of suffering and oppression? I and my people know, but not thou.”

Hell is not for eternity.

We are all brothers, and we are all suffering the same fate. The same smoke floats over all our heads. Help one another. It is the only way to survive.

They are committing the greatest indignity human beings can inflict on one another: telling people who have suffered excruciating pain and loss that their pain and loss were illusions.

There’s a long road of suffering ahead of you. But don’t lose courage.

Human suffering anywhere concerns men and women everywhere.

“To suffer terribly and to know yourself as the cause: that is Hell.”

Aren’t all these notes the senseless writings of a man who won’t accept the fact that there is nothing we can do with suffering except to suffer it?

Feel your suffering, rest with it, embrace it, make love with it. Feel your suffering so deeply and thoroughly that you penetrate it, and realize its fearful foundation.

“It was inevitable that she should accept any inconsistency and cruelty from her deity as all good worshippers do from theirs. All gods who receive homage are cruel. All gods dispense suffering without reason. Otherwise they would not be worshipped. Through indiscriminate suffering men know fear and fear is the most divine emotion. It is the stones for altars and the beginning of wisdom. Half gods are worshipped in wine and flowers. Real gods require blood.”

“Man can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, of independence of mind, even in . . . terrible conditions of psychic and physical stress.”

“There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings.”

“If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete.”

“I know that without the suffering, the growth that I have achieved would have been impossible.”

“When a man finds that it is his destiny to suffer, he will have to accept his suffering as his task.”

“There was no need to be ashamed of tears, for tears bore witness that a man had the greatest of courage, the courage to suffer.”

“I only insist that meaning is available in spite of—nay, even through—suffering.”

“The problem of reconciling human suffering with the existence of a God who loves, is only insoluble so long as we attach a trivial meaning to the word “love”, and look on things as if man were the centre of them.”

“Kindness, merely as such, cares not whether its object becomes good or bad, provided only that it escapes suffering.”

“Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself. ”

“And perhaps, by God’s grace, I succeed, and for a day or two become a creature consciously dependent on God and drawing its strength from the right sources. But the moment the threat is withdrawn, my whole nature leaps back to the toys: I am even anxious, God forgive me, to banish from my mind the only thing that supported me under the threat because it is now associated with the misery of those few days. Thus the terrible necessity of tribulation is only too clear. God has had me for but forty-eight hours and then only by dint of taking everything else away from me. Let Him but sheathe that sword for a moment and I behave like a puppy when the hated bath is over—I shake myself as dry as I can and race off to reacquire my comfortable dirtiness, if not in the nearest manure heap, at least in the nearest flower bed. And that is why tribulations cannot cease until God either sees us remade or sees that our remaking is now hopeless.”

“I must add, too, that the only purpose of the book is to solve the intellectual problem raised by suffering; for the far higher task of teaching fortitude and patience I was never fool enough to suppose myself qualified, nor have I anything to offer my readers except my conviction that when pain is to be borne, a little courage helps more than much knowledge, a little human sympathy more than much courage, and the least tincture of the love of God more than all. ”

“John is away all day, and even some nights when his cases are serious. I am glad my case is not serious! But these nervous troubles are dreadfully depressing. John does not know how much I really suffer. He knows there is no reason to suffer, and that satisfies him.”

“Dignity is as essential to human life as water, food, and oxygen. The stubborn retention of it, even in the face of extreme physical hardship, can hold a man’s soul in his body long past the point at which the body should have surrendered it.”

″Thinking that we can find some lasting pleasure and avoid pain is what in Buddhism is called samsara, a hopeless cycle that goes round and round endlessly and causes us to suffer greatly.″

“The paradox of vengefulness is that it makes men dependent upon those who have harmed them, believing that their release from pain will come only when their tormentors suffer.”

You got rid of them. Yes, that’s just like you. Getting rid of everything unpleasant instead of learning to put up with it. Whether ‘tis better in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows or outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them...But you don’t do either. Neither suffer nor oppose. You just abolish the slings and arrows. It’s too easy.

“When he thought of his history, what resonated with him now was not all that he had suffered but the divine love that he believed had intervened to save him.”

“Without suffering, there’d be no compassion.”

“The years that are gone seem like dreams—if one might go on sleeping and dreaming—but to wake up and find—oh! well! Perhaps it is better to wake up after all, even to suffer, rather than to remain a dupe to illusions all one’s life.”

“O, I have suffered With those that I saw suffer.”

“Mariam lay on the couch, hands tucked between her knees, watched the whirlpool of snow twisting and spinning outside the window. She remembered Nana saying once that each snowflake was a sigh heaved by an aggrieved woman somewhere in the world. That all the sighs drifted up the sky, gathered into clouds, then broke into tiny pieces that fell silently on the people below. *As a reminder of how people like us suffer,* she’d said. *How quietly we endure all that falls upon us.*”

“But I hope you will heed this: A man who has no conscience, no goodness, does not suffer.”

“I do not believe that sheer suffering teaches. If suffering alone taught, all the world would be wise, since everyone suffers. To suffering must be added mourning, understanding, patience, love, openness, and the willingness to remain vulnerable.”

“They became acquainted with sorrow and loved sorrow; they thirsted for suffering, and said that truth could only be attained through suffering. Then science appeared. As they became wicked they began talking of brotherhood and humanitarianism, and understood those ideas. As they became criminal, they invented justice and drew up whole legal codes in order to observe it, and to ensure their being kept, set up a guillotine. They hardly remembered what they had lost, in fact refused to believe that they had ever been happy and innocent.”

“The Colonel was screaming. He would inhale, and then scream. Inhale. Scream. Inhale. Scream. I thought, at first, that it was only yelling. But after a few breaths, I noticed a rhythm. And after a few more, I realized that the Colonel was saying words. He was screaming, “I’m so sorry.”

“The Buddha said that suffering was caused by desire, we’d learned, and that the cessation of desire meant the cessation of suffering. When you stopped wishing things wouldn’t fall apart, you’d stop suffering when they did. ”

“Suffering means being cut off from God. Therefore those who live in communion with him cannot really suffer.”

“That which came together will fall apart imperceptibly slowly, and I will forget, but she will forgive my forgetting, just as I forgive her for forgetting me and the Colonel and everyone but herself and her mom in those last moments she spent as a person.”

“Is there suffering upon this new earth? On our earth we can only love with suffering and through suffering. We cannot love otherwise, and we know of no other sort of love.”

“I saw clearly that so long as I was still a human being and not nothingness, I was alive and so could suffer, be angry and feel shame at my actions.”

“Happiness. The enemy of all suffering.”

“It seems that most people need to experience a great deal of suffering before they will relinquish resistance and accept - before they will forgive.”

“I am taught by suffering to endure.”

“There was no pain in their eyes and no knowledge of the agony of their body. There was only joy in them, and pride, a pride holier than it is fit for human pride to be.”

″[Jurgis] could not hear it often enough; he could not ask with enough variations. Yes, they had bought the house, they had really bought it. It belonged to them, they had only to pay the money and it would be all right. Then Jurgis covered his face with his hands, for there were tears in his eyes, and he felt like a fool. But he had had such a horrible fright; strong man as he was, it left him almost too weak to stand up.”

“Was I sleeping, while the others suffered? Am I sleeping now? Tomorrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of today?”

“Jurgis had first come to the stockyards he had been as clean as any workingman could well be. But later on, what with sickness and cold and hunger and discouragement, and the filthiness of his work, and the vermin in his home, he had given up washing in winter, and in summer only as much of him as would go into a basin. He had had a shower bath in jail, but nothing since—and now he would have a swim!”

“It was like breakers upon a beach; there was new water, but the wave looked just the same. He strolled about and talked with them, and the biggest of them told tales of their prowess, while those who were weaker, or younger and inexperienced, gathered round and listened in admiring silence. The last time he was there, Jurgis had thought of little but his family; but now he was free to listen to these men, and to realize that he was one of them—that their point of view was his point of view, and that the way they kept themselves alive in the world was the way he meant to do it in the future.”

“Call’s gone to round up a dern bunch of cowboys so we can head out for Montana with a dern bunch of cows and suffer for the rest of our lives.”

If there was no suffering, man would not know his limits, would not know himself.

“Suffering in search of truth gives true meaning to the truth.”

“Mindfulness is the best way to be with our suffering without being overwhelmed by it. Mindfulness is the capacity to dwell in the present moment, to know what’s happening in the here and now.”

“Where there is suffering, there is happiness.”

“Without suffering, there’s no happiness. So we shouldn’t discriminate against the mud. We have to learn how to embrace and cradle our own suffering and the suffering of the world, with a lot of tenderness.”

“We ruminate on suffering, regret, and sorrow. We chew on them, swallow them, bring them back up, and eat them again and again. If we’re feeding our suffering while we’re walking, working, eating, or talking, we are making ourselves victims of the ghosts of the past, of the future, or our worries in the present. We’re not living our lives.”

“This your island, which seemed as to this particular the happiest in the world, will suffer much by the cursed avarice of a few persons.”

“What does it mean to have to suffer so much if our lives are nothing more than the blink of an eye? … I learned a long time ago, Reuven, that a blink of an eye in itself is nothing. But the eye that blinks, that is something.”

“I think that he would rather suffer anything than entertain these false notions and live in this miserable manner.”

“[My father] taught me with silence. . .to look into myself, to find my own strength, to walk around inside myself in company with my soul. . . . One learns of the pain of others by suffering one’s own pain … by turning inside oneself. . . . It makes us aware of how frail and tiny we are and of how much we must depend upon the Master of the Universe.”

″ ‘Conor O’Malley,’ he said, his voice growing poisonous now. ‘Who everyone’s sorry for because of his mum. Who swans around school acting like he’s so different, like no one knows his suffering.’ ”

“When you first hear that suffering is a Noble Truth, you might wonder what’s so noble about suffering? The Buddha was saying that if we can recognize suffering, and if we embrace it and look deeply into its roots, then we’ll be able to let go of the habits that feed it and at the same time, find a way to happiness. Suffering has its beneficial aspects. It can be a an excellent teacher.”

“It occurred to me that the Catholics had done this to her—whatever it was, it surely qualified for the unmentioned UNSPEAKABLE OUTRAGE that Owen claimed his father and mother had suffered. There was something about Mrs. Meany’s obdurate self-imprisonment that smacked of religious persecution—if not eternal damnation.”

“Harry, suffering like this proves you are still a man! This pain is part of being human … the fact that you can feel pain like this is your greatest strength.”

“White Fang had ceased eating, lost heart, and allowed every dog of the team to thrash him.”

“Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.”

“How will I teach this mind what it is to have a soul? How will I teach this mind to understand pain? How will I teach it to want to take on another person’s suffering?”

“There’s no good way to lose a loved one—just, in the words of one twenty-six-year-old woman, ‘different kinds of hell.’ ”

“Time makes us sentimental. Perhaps, in the end, it is because of time that we suffer.”

“We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything—what a waste!”

“The hard work of sowing seed in what looks like perfectly empty earth has, as every farmer knows, a time of harvest. All suffering, all pain, all emptiness, all disappointment is seed: sow it in God and he will, finally, bring a crop of joy from it.”

“The answer is that there is no good answer. So as parents, as doctors, as judges, and as a society, we fumble through and make decisions that allow us to sleep at night—because morals are more important than ethics, and love is more important than law.‘”

“She is dying Sara. She will die, either tonight or tomorrow or maybe a year from now if we’re really lucky. You heard what Dr. Chance said. Arsenic’s not a cure. It just postpones what’s coming.’ My eyes fill with tears. ‘But I love her,’ I say, because that is reason enough.”

“Either this girl loses her sister, I think, or she’s going to lose herself.”

“Only a third of PTSD sufferers receive treatment because it is tough to diagnose and a challenge to treat, a situation further complicated by the fact that sufferers are often hard to reach.”

“Foolish woman. Don’t you realize this is just the beginning? We have the chance now to die with dignity.”

“Of course Anna should be honored for donating her bone marrow. Of course she deserves recognition. But the thought of rewarding someone for their suffering, frankly, never entered my mind.”

“There were, I considered, amongst my guests, varying degrees of guilt. Those whose guilt was the lightest should, I considered, pass out first, and not suffer the prolonged mental strain and fear that the more cold-blooded offenders were to suffer.”

“I have wanted . . . to commit a murder myself. I recognized this as the desire of the artist to express himself! . . . But—incongruous as it may seem to some—I was restrained and hampered by my innate sense of justice. The innocent must not suffer.”

“To see a wretched criminal squirming in the dock, suffering the tortures of the damned… was to me an exquisite pleasure. Mind you, I took no pleasure in seeing an innocent man there.”

“Child, when do you think is the time to love somebody the most? When they done good and made things easy for everybody? Well then, you ain’t through learning – because that ain’t the time at all. It’s when he’s at his lowest and can’t believe in hisself ‘cause the world done whipped him so! When you starts measuring somebody, measure him right, child, measure him right. Make sure you done taken into account what hills and valleys he come through before he got to wherever he is.”

“Cath could already feel the anxiety starting to tear her stomach into nervous little pieces. ‘It’s not just that…. I don’t like new places. New situations. There’ll be all those people, and I won’t know where to sit—I don’t want to go.’”

“So that your punishment will indeed be infinite. Oh, who can express what the state of a soul in such circumstances is! ”

“The attempt to avoid legitimate suffering lies at the root of all emotional illness.”

“That long-ago day, sitting in this very spot on the dock, she had already begun to feel it: how hard it would be to inherit their parents’ dreams. How suffocating to be so loved. She had felt Nath’s hands on her shoulders and been almost grateful to fall forward, to let herself sink… Don’t let me sink, she had thought as she reached for his hand, and he had promised not to when he took it. This moment, Lydia thought. This is where it all went wrong.”

“When we avoid the legitimate suffering that results from dealing with problems, we also avoid the growth that problems demand from us. It is for this reason that in chronic mental illness we stop growing, we become stuck. And without healing, the human spirit begins to shrivel.”

“Nobody will protect you from your suffering. You can’t cry it away or eat it away or starve it away or walk it away or punch it away or even therapy it away. It’s just there, and you have to survive it. You have to endure it.”

“Even when I bore the pain of my search valiantly, in silence, the mute sufferings of my soul were loud voices calling to your mercy. You knew what I endured, but no man knew.”

“yet all this while I liv’d uncomfortably, by reason of the constant Apprehensions I was in of their coming up on me by Surprize; from whence I observe, that the Expectation of Evil is more bitter than the Suffering, especially if there is no room to shake off that Expectation, or Apprehensions.”

“Our past may explain why we’re suffering but we must not use it as an excuse to stay in bondage.”

“No there’s no way not to suffer. But you try all kinds of ways to keep from drowning in it, to keep on top of it, and to make it seem—well, like, you. Like you did something, all right, and now you’re suffering for it.”

“If, as a culture, we don’t bear witness to grief, the burden of loss is placed entirely upon the bereaved, while the rest of us avert our eyes and wait for those in mourning to stop being sad, to let go, to move on, to cheer up. And if they don’t — if they have loved too deeply, if they do wake each morning thinking, I cannot continue to live — well, then we pathologize their pain; we call their suffering a disease. We do not help them: we tell them that they need to get help.”

“We have two lives, Roy, the life we learn with and the life we live with after that. Suffering is what brings us toward happiness.”

“The particularity of our problems can be made bearable only through the recognition of our universal humanity. We suffer uniquely, but we survive the same way.”

“I never did learn anything out of my past life, now I have to suffer again.”

“You got to take the crookeds with the straights. That’s what Papa used to say.”

“When you’re older you’ll know what people who love suffer. The agony. It’s better to be cold and young than to love.”

″ Like patience, passion comes from the same Latin root: pati. It does not mean to flow with exuberance. It means to suffer.”

“I did not pray for any relief, but I prayed for strength to suffer with courage, humility and love.”

“A blight is on our harvest in the ear, A blight upon the grazing flocks and herds, A blight on wives in travail; and withal Armed with his blazing torch the God of Plague Hath swooped upon our city emptying The house of Cadmus, and the murky realm Of Pluto is full fed with groans and tears.”

“He does not ask much of us, merely a thought of Him from time to time, a little act of adoration, sometimes to ask for His grace, sometimes to offer Him your sufferings, at other times to thank Him for the graces, past and present, He has bestowed on you, in the midst of your troubles to take solace in Him as often as you can.”

“Wretch, may he pine in utter wretchedness!”

“We should put life in our faith. We should give ourselves utterly to God in pure abandonment, in temporal and spiritual matters alike, and find contentment in the doing of His will, whether he takes us through sufferings or consolations.”

“Let us occupy ourselves entirely in knowing God. The more we know Him, the more we will desire to know Him. As love increases with knowledge, the more we know God, the more we will truly love Him. We will learn to love Him equally in times of distress or in times of great joy.”

“The particularity of our problems can be made bearable only through the recognition of our universal humanity. We suffer uniquely, but we survive the same way.”

“All throughout Scripture and history, the principal suffering of the poor is not that they can’t pay their rent on time or that they are three dollars short of a package of Pampers . . . The principal suffering of the poor is shame and disgrace.”

“Look! Her wedding ring slipped – she had grown so thin. It was she who suffered – but she had nobody to tell.”

“I...have a woman in my arms who has suffered greatly and desperately needs to believe once again that she is beautiful.”

“One cannot bring children into a world like this. One cannot perpetuate suffering, or increase the breed of these lustful animals, who have no lasting emotions, but only whims and vanities, eddying them now this way, now that.”

“For even in the likeness of the sufferings, there remains an unlikeness in the sufferers; and though exposed to the same anguish, virtue and vice are not the same thing.”

“He suffered ever the same unceasing agonies and in his loneliness pondered always on the same insoluble question: ‘What is this? Can it be that it is Death?’ And the inner voice answered: ‘Yes, it is Death.‘”

“But now George has TB and they tell me he may even die... Which adds to that darkness in my mind, all these DEATH things piling up suddenly -- But I cant believe old Zen Master George is going to allow his body to die.”

“I have no ... authority to be speaking up like a seer ... We’ve had enough seers in this family. ”

“Though good and bad men suffer alike, we must not suppose that there is no difference between the men themselves.”

″‘How could any Lord have made this world?’ she asked. With her mind she had always seized the fact that there is no reason, order, justice: but suffering, death, the poor. There was no treachery too base for the world to commit; she knew that. No happiness lasted; she knew that.”

″ All my life’s been full of hard trouble. If I wasn’t hungry, I was sick. And if I wasn’t sick, I was in trouble. I ain’t never bothered nobody. I just worked hard every day as long as I can remember. ... And now I’m in this. They looking for me and when they catch me they’ll kill me. ”

“Being alive and being a woman is all I got but being colored is a metaphysical dilemma I haven’t conquered yet”

“Justice is not Healing. Healing cometh only by suffering and patience, and maketh no demand, not even for Justice.”

“Jesus’ suffering and death brought joy and life. His humiliation brought glory; his rejection brought a community of love.”

“Many people suffer because of the false supposition on which they have based their lives. That supposition is that there should be no fear or loneliness, no confusion or doubt. But these sufferings can only be dealt with creatively when they are understood as wounds integral to our human condition. ”

“Perhaps the main task of the minister is to prevent people from suffering for the wrong reasons.”

“Sully suffers from a stutter, simple syllables will clutter, stalling speeches up on beaches like a sunken sailboat rudder.”

“In short: ‘Who can take away suffering without entering it?’ ”

“We feel friendly towards those whom we help to secure good for themselves, provided we are not likely to suffer heavily by it ourselves.”

“Mother, when you’re disappointed, you get that awful suffering look on your face, like the picture of Jesus’ mother in the museum.”

“The evil-doer mourns in this world, and he mourns in the next; he mourns in both. He mourns and suffers when he sees the evil of his own work.”

“Of all the world’s errors, he seemed to feel, the most fundamental was the ‘erasing’ of people, the ‘hiding away’ of suffering.’”

“They called it battle fatigue, and they said hallucinations were common with malarial fever.”

“He could feel it inside his skull—the tension of little threads being pulled and how it was with tangled things, things tied together, and as he tried to pull them apart and rewind them into their places, they snagged and tangled even more.”

“If you don’t get what you want, you suffer; if you get what you don’t want, you suffer; even when you get exactly what you want, you still suffer because you can’t hold on to it forever.”

“I think Haiti is a place that suffers so much from neglect that people only want to hear about it when it’s at its extreme. And that’s what they end up knowing about it.”

“In order to rise from its own ashes a phoenix first must burn.”

“We have mastered our surroundings, increased food production, built cities, established empires and created far-flung trade networks. But did we decrease the amount of suffering in the world?”

“Before now, and for quite some time, we maintained our decorum and suffered in silence whatever you men did, because you wouldn’t let us make a sound.”

“Remembering a wrong is like carrying a burden on the mind.”

“You have noticed that the truth comes into this world with two faces. One is sad with suffering, and the other laughs; but it is the same face, laughing or weeping.”

“They say of some temporary suffering, ‘No future bliss can make up for it,’ not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory.”

“Suffering has a noble purpose: the evolution of consciousness and the burning up of the ego.” ”

“Accepting means you allow yourself to feel whatever it is you are feeling at that moment. It is part of the isness of the Now. You can’t argue with what is. Well, you can, but if you do, you suffer.”

“There is recompense for suffering. A principle beyond selfishness is at work in the cosmos. All will be well. I do not know whether any of this is true. I am certain that the scientific community does not know that it is false.”

“Walking back past the roadside cross, Félicité decided to commend to God what she cherished the most. She stood there for a long time, looking up at the sky and praying, her face bathed in tears.”

“The more time you spend thinking about yourself, the more suffering you will experience.”

“Her sorrow was extreme. She threw herself on the ground, screamed, appealed to God, and wept all alone in the fields until the sunrise. Then she returned to the farm and announced that she wanted to leave.”

“Sadly, many of the things that undermine our joy and happiness, we create ourselves. Often it comes from the negative tendencies of the mind, emotional reactivity, or from our inability to appreciate and utilize the resources within us… We create most of our suffering, so it should be logical that we also have the ability to create more joy.”

“The secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past, nor to worry about the future, but to live the present moment wisely and earnestly.”

“When we see these things (suffering), we realize that not only do we suffer, but so do many of our human brothers and sisters. So when we look at the same event from a wider perspective, we will reduce the worrying and our own suffering.”

“The root of suffering is attachment.”

“There is nothing so disobedient as an undisciplined mind, and there is nothing so obedient as a disciplined mind.”

“People suffer because they are caught in their views. As soon as we release those views, we are free and we don’t suffer anymore.”

“Pain is certain, suffering is optional.”

“Ambition is like love, impatient both of delays and rivals.”

“Have compassion for all beings, rich and poor alike; each has their suffering. Some suffer too much, others too little.”

“Our life is shaped by our mind; we become what we think. Suffering follows an evil thought as the wheels of a cart follow the oxen that draws it.”

“The seed of suffering in you may be strong, but don’t wait until you have no more suffering before allowing yourself to be happy.”

“Mindfulness puts an end to such a limited perspective. The Buddha faced his own suffering directly and discovered the path of liberation. Don’t run away from things that are unpleasant in order to embrace things that are pleasant. Put your hands in the earth. Face the difficulties and grow new happiness.”

“And yet she hadn’t the air of a woman whose life had been touched by uncertainty or suffering. Pain, fear, and grief were things that left their mark on people. Even love, that exquisite torturing emotion, left its subtle traces on the countenance.”

“Anxiety, the illness of our time, comes primarily from our inability to dwell in the present moment.”

“If a man speak or act with a good thought, happiness follows him like a shadow that never leaves him.”

“The greatest miracle is to be alive. We can put an end to our suffering just by realizing that our suffering is not worth suffering for! How many people kill themselves because of rage or despair? In that moment, they do not see the vast happiness that is available.”

Sutra II.15: Parinama tapa samskara duhkhaih guna vrtti virodhaccha duhkham evam sarvam vivekinah Translation: Change, longing, habits, and the activity of the gunas can all cause us suffering. In fact, even the wise suffer, for suffering is everywhere.

“Suffering is not good for the soul, unless it teaches you how to stop suffering. That is its purpose.”

“No human being can know the future. The greatest of disasters may overtake a man in the best of places, and the greatest happiness may seek him out in the worst. ”

“And now the rule of your life is this: Do not rejoice when you have found, do not weep when you have lost. ”

“There’s no hope for him now, Travis. He’s suffering. You know we’ve got to do it.”

“The plague killed so many, Comfort, labor was scarce, good fields were left untilled. Poor folk like us began to know our worth and ask for better wages. That angered King Edward, our king’s grandfather. When the strong grow angry, Comfort, the weak will suffer.”

“All suffering has an end, David, if only you wait long enough. Sorrow has its life like people. Sorrow is born and lives and dies. And when it’s dead and gone, someone’s left behind to remember it. Exactly like people.”

“The greatest sources of our suffering are the lies we tell ourselves.”

“Sarah couldn’t stand up straight any longer. She was too weak. The sun burned her faced. The babe cried and cried.”

“There are always two people involved in cruelty, aren’t there? One to be vicious and someone to suffer!”

“I don’t want to be another one of those people who just pretend like they don’t know about the suffering, like they don’t see it every single day, like they don’t walk past it on their way to school or work.”

“In sorrow and suffering, go straight to God with confidence, and you will be strengthened, enlightened and instructed.”

″ ‘Dear little swallow,’ said the Prince, ‘you tell me of marvelous things, but more marvelous than anything is the suffering of men and women. There is no mystery so great as Misery. Fly over my city, little swallow, and tell me what you see.’ ”

“Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional. Say you’re running and you think, ‘Man, this hurts, I can’t take it anymore. The ‘hurt’ part is an unavoidable reality, but whether or not you can stand anymore is up to the runner himself.”

“It’s an awful truth that suffering can deepen us, give a greater lustre to our colours, a richer resonance to our words.”

As you would expect from children who have suffered loss and abuse, there is bullying, fighting and physical violence.

“Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.”

“Cruelty is a mystery, and the waste of pain.”

“Ben crouched beside the dying animal, aware that he could do nothing to save it now -that in a sense that he had done too much already.”

“It is too deeply branded. Ye cannot take it off. And would that I might endure his agony, as well as mine!”

“Even if I imagine a scheme of vengeance, what could I do better for my object than to let thee live,—than to give thee medicines against all harm and peril of life,—so that this burning shame may still blaze upon thy bosom?”

“let her cover the mark as she will, the pang of it will be always in her heart.”

“Your clutch is on his life, and you cause him to die daily a living death; and still he knows you not.”

“I have thought of death,” said she,—“have wished for it,—would even have prayed for it, were it fit that such as I should pray for anything. Yet if death be in this cup, I bid thee think again, ere thou beholdest me quaff it. See! It is even now at my lips.”

“But still, methinks, it must needs be better for the sufferer to be free to show his pain, as this poor woman Hester is, than to cover it all up in his heart.”

Happy are you, Hester, that wear the scarlet letter openly upon your bosom! Mine burns in secret!

Nor do I,—whom the scarlet letter has disciplined to truth, though it be the truth of red-hot iron, entering into the soul,—nor do I perceive such advantage in his living any longer a life of ghastly emptiness, that I shall stoop to implore thy mercy.

“God knows; and He is merciful! He hath proved his mercy, most of all, in my afflictions. By giving me this burning torture to bear upon my breast! By sending yonder dark and terrible old man, to keep the torture always at red-heat! By bringing me hither, to die this death of triumphant ignominy before the people!

Jo devoted herself to Beth day and night, not a hard task, for Beth was very patient, and bore her pain uncomplainingly as long as she could control herself.

Surely, surely, we have ransomed one another, with all this woe!

Beth has grown slender, pale, and more quiet than ever. The beautiful, kind eyes are larger, and in them lies an expression that saddens one, although it is not sad itself. It is the shadow of pain which touches the young face with such pathetic patience, but Beth seldom complains and always speaks hopefully of ‘being better soon’.

“What matters really, not only to me, but to officers of justice and the king, is that an innocent man should languish in prison, the victim of an infamous denunciation, to die here cursing his executioners.”

“What did he know about sin and suffering—”

“We are very happy, monsieur,” replied Julie; “but we have also known unhappiness, and few have ever undergone more bitter sufferings than ourselves.”

Providence appears to me to have no share in this affair; and happily so, for instead of the invisible, impalpable agent of celestial rewards and punishments, I shall find one both palpable and visible, on whom I shall revenge myself, I assure you, for all I have suffered during the last month.

“Alas, my dear mother, some have suffered so much, and yet live, and have raised a new fortune on the ruin of all the promises of happiness which heaven had made them—on the fragments of all the hope which God had given them! I have seen that, mother; I know that from the gulf in which their enemies have plunged them they have risen with so much vigor and glory that in their turn they have ruled their former conquerors, and have punished them.”

“I need your help: that is I thought like a madman that you could lend me your assistance in a case where God alone can succor me.”

Oh, my God, I have suffered enough surely! Have pity on me, and do for me what I am unable to do for myself.

All my hopes are blighted, my heart is broken, my life a burden, everything around me is sad and mournful; earth has become distasteful to me, and human voices distract me. It is a mercy to let me die, for if I live I shall lose my reason and become mad.

“I have often thought with a bitter joy that these riches, which would make the wealth of a dozen families, will be forever lost to those men who persecute me. This idea was one of vengeance to me, and I tasted it slowly in the night of my dungeon and the despair of my captivity. But now I have forgiven the world for the love of you; now that I see you, young and with a promising future,—now that I think of all that may result to you in the good fortune of such a disclosure, I shudder at any delay, and tremble lest I should not assure to one as worthy as yourself the possession of so vast an amount of hidden wealth.”

“Ah, sir,” said he, “tell me what is the matter with me. I am suffering—I cannot see. A thousand fiery darts are piercing my brain. Ah, don’t touch me, pray don’t.”

The something that I had noticed before, clicked in the man’s throat again, and he turned his back. The boat had returned, and his guard were ready, so we followed him to the landing-place made of rough stakes and stones, and saw him put into the boat, which was rowed by a crew of convicts like himself. No one seemed surprised to see him, or interested in seeing him, or glad to see him, or sorry to see him, or spoke a word, except that somebody in the boat growled as if to dogs, “Give way, you!” which was the signal for the dip of the oars. By the light of the torches, we saw the black Hulk lying out a little way from the mud of the shore, like a wicked Noah’s ark. Cribbed and barred and moored by massive rusty chains, the prison-ship seemed in my young eyes to be ironed like the prisoners. We saw the boat go alongside, and we saw him taken up the side and disappear. Then, the ends of the torches were flung hissing into the water, and went out, as if it were all over with him.

“On this day of the year, long before you were born, this heap of decay,” stabbing with her crutched stick at the pile of cobwebs on the table, but not touching it, “was brought here. It and I have worn away together. The mice have gnawed at it, and sharper teeth than teeth of mice have gnawed at me.”

“It would have been cruel in Miss Havisham, horribly cruel, to practise on the susceptibility of a poor boy, and to torture me through all these years with a vain hope and an idle pursuit, if she had reflected on the gravity of what she did. But I think she did not. I think that, in the endurance of her own trial, she forgot mine, Estella.”

I know what he suffers now, for instance, exactly: it is merely a beginning of what he shall suffer, though. And he’ll never be able to emerge from his bathos of coarseness and ignorance.

“I wish I could hold you,” she continued, bitterly, “till we were both dead! I shouldn’t care what you suffered. I care nothing for your sufferings. Why shouldn’t you suffer? I do! Will you forget me? Will you be happy when I am in the earth? Will you say twenty years hence, ‘That’s the grave of Catherine Earnshaw? I loved her long ago, and was wretched to lose her; but it is past. I’ve loved many others since: my children are dearer to me than she was; and, at death, I shall not rejoice that I am going to her: I shall be sorry that I must leave them!’ Will you say so, Heathcliff?”

No-one dared to remove the apple lodged in Gregor’s flesh, so it remained there as a visible reminder of his injury. He had suffered it there for more than a month, and his condition seemed serious enough to remind even his father that Gregor, despite his current sad and revolting form, was a family member who could not be treated as an enemy.

There are a hundred thousand mothers who are living in misery and squalor, struggling to earn enough to feed their little ones!

“You who have felt what it is to be so neglected! You could pity your own sufferings; and she pitied them, too; but you won’t pity hers!

There will be nothing singular in his case; and it is singularity which often makes the worst part of our suffering, as it always does of our conduct.