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All suffering is caused by being in the wrong place. If you're unhappy where you are, MOVE.
TIMOTHY LEARY, Evolutionary Agents
Suffering of sentient beings is like decay; it fertilizes the growth of their souls.
ANNE RICE, Memnoch the Devil
Suffering well borne is better than suffering removed.
HENRY WARD BEECHER, Life Thoughts
Let a man live but two or three years without Affliction, and he is almost good for nothing.
WELLINS CALCOTT, Thoughts Moral and Divine
Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seamed with scars.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
Even the damned in hell have the community of their suffering.
Troubles come to us like mire and filth; but, when mingled with the soil, they change to flower and fruit.
HENRY WARD BEECHER, Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
All that affliction of the darkest kind ever can work to the true soul is to awaken it up to spiritual things, to open the clear eye, to make the spiritual reality the more real. If you rightly comprehend it it only strikes that which is round about you, it only removes that which is outward and physical, but it leaves you all the same a greater and a better man for your trial.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
- To rest in your own suffering
- Is evasion of suffering. We must learn to suffer more.
T. S. ELIOT, The Family Reunion
Troubles are often the tools by which God fashions us for better things.
HENRY WARD BEECHER, Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
- Never a tear bedims the eye
- That time and patience will not dry.
BRET HARTE, "The Lost Galleon"
In sorrow and in suffering are hidden the springs of a peace and a power that can be affected by no outward storms. It is a great thing, when one has grown strong through that trial which melts away the dross and proves the true gold; when, being driven to the handling of many expedients, he has been trained to detect all counterfeit comforts, and to discriminate between unsubstantial good and that which abides every test; when he has learned to dispense with all outward props, can let riches, honors, health drop away from him, and yet feel that all this does not touch his real life; while above these coils of uncertainty and mutation he lifts his naked personality erect in its own spiritual resources. Surely, prosperity has never generated such depths of power, such intrinsic and full consolation.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
As a rule I don't like suffering to no purpose. Suffering should be creative, should give birth to something good and lovely.
CHINUA ACHEBE, A Man of the People
Most people don't mind suffering in silence as long as everyone else knows about it.
CROFT M. PENTZ, The Complete Book of Zingers
- The best fruit loads the broken bough;
- And in the wounds our sufferings plow,
- Immortal love sows sovereign seed.
GERALD MASSEY, "The Ballad of Babe Christabel"
Suffering is as God's letter. Open it and read it. Many a one will find that he is titled, or that there is an inheritance laid up for him.
HENRY WARD BEECHER, Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
- Nothing brings suffering as does
- the untamed, uncontrolled unattended and unrestrained heart.
- That heart brings suffering.
GAUTAMA BUDDHA, Anguttara Nikaya
Affliction is a spiritual physic for the soul, and is compared to a furnace, for as gold is tried and purified therein, so men are proved and either purified from their dross, and fitted for good uses, or else entirely burnt up and undone forever.
WELLINS CALCOTT, Thoughts Moral and Divine
The brightest crowns that are worn in heaven have been tried, and smelted, and polished, and glorified through the furnace of tribulation.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
- Laugh, and the world laughs with you;
- Weep, and you weep alone,
- For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth,
- But it has trouble enough of its own.
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX, "Solitude"
We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.
D. H. LAWRENCE, Lady Chatterley's Lover
But oh! shipmates! on the starboard hand of every woe, there is a sure delight; and higher the top of that delight, than the bottom of the woe is deep.
HERMAN MELVILLE, Moby Dick
- A heart is that which opens
- To trouble's thousand ways;
- An unseen arrow wounds it,
- To halt through all its days.
- An evil eye may scatter blight,
- A flitting mite may sting;
- No wonder that a heartache
- Is such a common thing!
CAROLINE SPENCER, "Heartache"
When someone does not know how to handle his own suffering, he allows it to spill all over the people around him. When you suffer, you make people around you suffer. That's very natural. This is why we have to learn how to handle our suffering, so we won't spread it everywhere.
This suffering, this unspeakable capacity to bleed and to know pain and to know annihilation, is what has to be overcome in this world of anyone is to reach God.
ANNE RICE, Memnoch the Devil
One must cast off old agonies as a snake casts off its skin--only to grow a new set and accept all of their limitations.
FRANK HERBERT, Children of Dune
- Alas! fond child,
- How are thy thoughts beguil'd
- To hope for honey from a nest of wasps?
- Thou may'st as well
- Go seek for ease in hell,
- Or sprightly nectar from the mouths of asps.
- The world's a hive,
- From whence thou canst derive
- No good, but what thy soul's vexation brings:
- But case thou meet
- Some petty-petty sweet,
- Each drop is guarded with a thousand stings.
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