quotations about suffering
Sick system built on suffering
Sick system built on pain
It's a bullet in the head
Of every happy boy and girl
NASUM
"Sick System"
All suffering contorts the countenance so woefully that the pain flies to the beholder likewise.
JAMES VILA BLAKE
Essays
Wherefore, though good and bad men suffer alike, we must not suppose that there is no difference between the men themselves, because there is no difference in what they both suffer. 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. For as the same fire causes gold to glow brightly, and chaff to smoke; and under the same flail the straw is beaten small, while the grain is cleansed; and as the lees are not mixed with the oil, though squeezed out of the vat by the same pressure, so the same violence of affliction proves, purges, clarifies the good, but damns, ruins, exterminates the wicked.
ST. AUGUSTINE
The City of God
There is an art in taking the whiplash of suffering full in the face, an art you must learn. Let each single attack exhaust itself; pain always makes single attacks, so that its bite may be more intense, more concentrated. And you, while its fangs are implanted and injecting their venom at one spot, do not forget to offer it another place where it can bite you, and so relieve the pain of the first.
CESARE PAVESE
This Business of Living, October 19, 1940
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
Perhaps it is only human nature to inflict suffering on anything that will endure suffering, whether by reason of its genuine humility, or indifference, or sheer helplessness.
HONORE DE BALZAC
Père Goriot
If troubles were put up to market, I'd sooner buy old than new. It's something to have seen the worst.
GEORGE ELIOT
Felix Holt
A man who has been through bitter experiences and travelled far enjoys even his sufferings after a time.
HOMER
The Odyssey
The role of the human brain was to rationalize suffering.
MAILE MELOY
"The Proxy Marriage", The New Yorker, May 21, 2012
You have to suffer in order to be a human being who can help people understand suffering.
NICHOLSON BAKER
The Anthologist
Seek not life's jewels where the poppies grow,
Nor where Desire, all passion-poisoned, rears
Her luring domes, but in the heart of woe,
With shores far washed by sanctifying tears.
EDWARD ROBESON TAYLOR
"Life's Jewels"
To rest in your own suffering
Is evasion of suffering. We must learn to suffer more.
T. S. ELIOT
The Family Reunion
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
Suffering is the crucible where real faith is born.
RAM DASS
One-Liners: A Mini-Manual for a Spiritual Life
I am one of those whom suffering has made empty and frivolous: each night in my dreams I pull the scab off a wound; each day, vacuous and habit-ridden, I help it re-form.
CYRIL CONNOLLY
The Unquiet Grave
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.
C. S. LEWIS
The Problem of Pain
The public's spirit of solidarity in face of suffering is heartening and reminds us of our common humanity.
DIPTI PARDESHI
"Refugee Week: British solidarity in the face of suffering", The London Economic, June 25, 2017
No man ever grows to a full man's estate without the ministration of suffering.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
In some mysterious way, once one has gained an insight into human nature, that insight grows from day to day, and he to whom it has given to experience vicariously even one single form of earthly suffering acquires, by reason of this tragic lesson, an understanding of all its forms, even those most foreign to him, and apparently abnormal.
STEFAN ZWEIG
Beware of Pity
As one grows weaker one is less susceptible to suffering. There is less hurt because there is less to hurt.
JACK LONDON
The Star Rover