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Every nerve that can thrill with pleasure, can also agonize with pain.
HORACE MANN, A Few Thoughts for a Young Man
A little bit of pain is good for you. I feel alive. Everybody needs struggle. Once you overcome an obstacle, you springboard into the future. Life is interesting and short and it's not supposed to be easy, and if it is, you're probably just in denial and you're existing here like a zombie.
- Sweet is pleasure after pain.
JOHN DRYDEN, Alexander's Feast
The power to cause pain is the only power that matters, the power to kill and destroy, because if you can't kill then you are always subject to those who can, and nothing and no one will ever save you.
ORSON SCOTT CARD, Ender's Game
Politeness only teaches us to save others from unnecessary pain.... You are not bound by politeness to tell any falsehoods.
MARIA EDGEWORTH, The Flowerpot
Effort is only effort when it begins to hurt.
JOSÉ ORTEGA Y GASSET, as quoted in Jason A. Merchey's Building a Life of Value
Pain can be endured and defeated only if it is embraced. Denied or feared, it grows.
Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, Tender is the Night
Pain is rewarding, in every capacity.
CHRISTINA AGUILERA, Rolling Stone, Aug. 24, 2006
- I hate all pain,
- Given or received; we have enough within us
- The meanest vassal as the loftiest monarch,
- Not to add to each other's natural burden
- Of mortal misery.
Lord, help us to accept the pains and conflicts that come to us each day as opportunities to grow as people and become more like you.
MOTHER TERESA, A Gift for God
Pain can only feed on pain. Pain cannot feed on joy. It finds it quite indigestible.
ECKHART TOLLE, The Power of Now
Pain is a part of growing up. It's how we learn.
DAN BROWN, Angels & Demons
Pain must enter into its glorified life of memory before it can turn into compassion.
GEORGE ELIOT, Middlemarch
Of all the things we can feel with our minds and bodies, severe pain is the purest, for it drives everything else from our awareness and focuses us as perfectly as we can ever be focused.
DEAN KOONTZ, Dark Rivers of the Heart
- One word
- Frees us of all the weight and pain of life:
- That word is love.
SOPHOCLES, Oedipus at Colonus
To hurt is as human as to breathe.
J. K. ROWLING, The Tales of Beedle the Bard
People come and go, pain comes and goes. But so does joy. And if our hearts are closed because we don't want to suffer, they won't be open enough to recognize the joy as it flies by.
GENEEN ROTH, Good Housekeeping, Dec. 2008
Pain is a gift. Humanity, without pain, would know neither fear nor pity. Without fear, there could be no humility, and every man would be a monster. The recognition of pain and fear in others gives rise in us to pity, and in our pity is our humanity, our redemption.
There are cases in which it is necessary to inflict pain now to avoid greater pain later on, or to gain future pleasure that is worth the current pain.
SUSAN HUBBARD, The Society of S
You want to find out a mode of renunciation that will be an escape from pain. I tell you again, there is no such escape possible except by perverting or mutilating one's nature.
GEORGE ELIOT, The Mill on the Floss
Pain has a way of clipping our wings and keeping us from being able to fly ... and if left unresolved for very long, you can almost forget that you were ever created to fly in the first place.
WM. PAUL YOUNG, The Shack
Pain and illness, the deaths of those one loves, and discomforts and disappointments mar the happy norm, but they do not alter the fact that happiness is the norm, nor affect the tendency of the continuum to restore it, to heal it, after any disturbance.
JEAN LIEDLOFF, The Continuum Concept
Wherefore groan and lament over pain? Be, rather, thankful for this one sign of life; for the dead suffer no pain, and lay figures are never chilled by frost.
- Mortal! that cull'st the flowers of life,
- Think not to escape the thorn.
WILLIAM B. TAPPAN, "The Thorn of Life"
When we are suddenly released from an acute absorbing bodily pain, our heart and senses leap out in new freedom; we think even the noise of streets harmonious, and are ready to hug the tradesman who is wrapping up our change.
GEORGE ELIOT, Janet's Repentance
Pain ... has a structure. It has a floor plan. It has designs more intricate than a chambered nautilus, features more baroque than the most buttressed Gothic cathedral.... it is a poem.
DAN SIMMONS, The Fall of Hyperion
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