Top 100 But Painful Quotes
#1. What happened to us in September, 2001, is a microcosmic but painful and powerful example of the fact we live in an inter-dependent world that is not yet an integrated global community.
William J. Clinton
#2. Blame doesn't empower you. It keeps you stuck in a place you don't want to be because you don't want to make the temporary, but painful decision, to be responsible for the outcome of your own life's happiness.
Shannon L. Alder
#3. Great drama, like the energy implicit in every atom, is eternally around and within us, but liberated only by coincidence, ceremony, creativity, periods reaching completion, pressures reaching the bursting point, and the simple but painful cultivation of awareness.
Robert Grudin
#4. There are two industry secrets to surviving a long day on camera on the red carpet: First, no drinking the night before - ever. You can celebrate after with some bubbly. Second is make sure to use shoe insoles. I don't care if you are a guy or a girl, dress shoes are painful. Worth it, but painful.
Ross Mathews
#5. In the distance, a building explodes in flame. She has over a hundred men working this district, letting everyone feel the pain of real enforcement. Laws are a fine thing on paper, but painful when no bribery can ease their bind. People have forgotten this.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#6. Tattoos are a right of passage. They're a marker of bravery, of maturity, of cultural acceptance. The tattoo represents not only a willingness to accept pain - to endure it - but a need to actively embrace it. Because life is painful - beautiful but painful ...
Nicola Barker
#7. Laws are a fine thing on paper, but painful when no bribery can ease their bind.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#8. There are times when the adoption process is exhausting and painful and makes you want to scream. But, I am told, so does childbirth.
Scott Simon
#9. I love and in a way need, a private secret place. It's a kind of deep obsession, but I also love to need and be with friends and the two things often need to be together ... it's a painful conflict that will never be smoothly resolved.
Morris Graves
#11. Change is always proceeded by a little pain. Some people can change and they don't have to go through so many painful things. But I think that I'm of a personality that I'm a little stubborn, so it's always tough for me.
Mel Gibson
#12. Well: the day is a poem but too much Like one of Jeffers's, crusted with blood and barbaric omens Painful to excess, inhuman as a hawk's cry.
Robinson Jeffers
#13. A painful truth I'd learn later: you may be ready to grow, but you can't fertilize friends and grow them with you.
Sara Levine
#14. It is always painful to part from people whom one has known for a brief space of time. The absence of old friends one can endure with equanimity, But even a momentary separation from anyone to whom one has just been introduced is almost unbearable.
Oscar Wilde
#15. But if you've ever felt love, you'll know how painful it is to suffer for love.
Paulo Coelho
#16. Life is difficult and painful, but if you keep moving forward the final destination makes all of the pain worth it.
Seth Adam Smith
#17. What has been done in the world - the works of genius - cost nothing. There is no painful effort, but it is the spontaneous flowing of the thought. Shakespeare made his Hamlet as a bird weaves its nest.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#18. To lose an arm or a leg would be painful, but to lose the central truth of your life felt - fatal.
Cassandra Clare
#19. What's painful is that what you had together, all your inside jokes and favorite restaurants and that movie you both loved but everyone else hated - that's gone, and there's no replacement for it, you never replicate it, never get to have it ever again ...
Kim Culbertson
#20. Separation is painful, but so is its opposite. And if being together brings joy, then it is only proper that separation should do the same in its own way.
Yukio Mishima
#22. I'm NOT used to it! But ... I'm not as scared as I was before. Getting rejected is painful, but there are also people who accept me. We aren't alone, you know. And that's why we have nothing to be afraid of.
Sakura Tsukuba
#23. The practice of thrift is not outdated. We must discipline ourselves to live within our incomes even if it means going without or making do. The wise person can distinguish ... between basic needs and extravagant wants. Some find budgeting extremely painful, but I promise you, it is never fatal.
Marvin J. Ashton
#24. I did not feel drawn to huxley. He was beautiful physically but again without vibrations or sensory antennae ... and I had a painful impression of a psychic blindness. With all his science and knowledge, in the mystic world he blundered.
Anais Nin
#25. But human withdrawal is a very painful and lonely process, because it forces us to face directly our own condition in all its beauty as well as misery.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#26. You can understand why a system would seek information - but why in hell does it offer information? Why do we strive to be understood? Why is a refusal to accept communication so painful?
James Tiptree Jr.
#27. Break ups are painful, but if initiated at the right time can fuel one's sense of optimism.
Dov Davidoff
#28. Your true traveller finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty - his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.
Aldous Huxley
#29. Pain is painful but an essential ingredient of life. Suffering is optional.
Debasish Mridha
#30. When you move forward in life or move on with life..
Moving on from people is the most difficult and painful..
But probably the most 'necessary'..
One may have to leave behind many who's, what's, when's, where's and why's..
Imperative to maintaining forward momentum in life..
Abha Maryada Banerjee
#31. The main thing that I loved about living alone was the silence. Sometimes simply talking to people was like listening to white noise. Often I could tune the sound out and be all right, but other times it was like hearing nails on a chalkboard - almost painful.
Adrianne Brooks
#32. When it touches your soul, truth is like fire," he began. "As you know, when we rest too close to the fire we quickly become uncomfortable. Too close and it even becomes painful. But that doesn't always mean we should try to elude its flames.
Serena Chase
#33. Do not hide who you are. These are a nurturer's hands. Cooking is hard and sometimes painful work, but you do it to share your gift with us. Your cooking improves our lives. Don't ever be ashamed of who you are.
Amy E. Reichert
#34. The rest of the short walk was silent. It was that loud sort
of silence where the absence is painful, when there's so much to
say, but nothing is said.
Jacqueline Simon Gunn
#35. I think people think celebrities get babies really easily, like Angelina Jolie, but they don't hear about the ones who aren't successful because we don't like talking about it, it's too painful.
Alex Kingston
#36. A show has to change and evolve. Sometimes the change is painful, but that doesn't mean it's not good or correct.
Stephen Nathan
#37. But pure wit is akin to Puritanism; to the perfect and painful consciousness of the final fact in the universe. Very briefly, the man who sees the consistency in things is a wit - and a Calvinist. The man who sees the inconsistency in things is a humorist - and a Catholic.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#38. Education ... is a painful, continual and difficult work to be done in kindness, by watching, by warning, ... by praise, but above all
by example.
John Ruskin
#39. My dear, I'm seldom sure of anything. Life at best is a precarious business, and we aren't told that difficult or painful things won't happen, just that it matters. It matters not just to us but to the entire universe.
Madeleine L'Engle
#40. My mother gave me singing lessons; that was totally painful, because I couldn't do what she wanted to hear. She used to say: there's more there, there's more voice but I just didn't want to give it to her.
Linda Lavin
#41. Growth can be painful, change can be painful but nothing is as painful as staying stuck somewhere you don't belong Anxiety does not empty tomorrow of its sorrow it only empties today of it strengths
Charles Spurgeon
#42. His face was badly bruised and swollen and altogether painful looking, but it really brought out his eyes.
Nicole Castle
#43. Everywhere revolutions are painful yet a fruitful gestation of people; they shed blood but create light, they eliminate men but elaborate ideas.
Manuel Gonzalez Flores
#44. When we have painful memories from hurting experiences, we may feel justified in holding on to the resentment. But resentment is corrosive. It doesn't affect the person we feel anger toward, it destroys the host.
Susan L. Taylor
#45. Those who love, friends and lovers, know that love is not only a blinding flash, but also a long and painful struggle in the darkness for the realization of definitive recognition and reconciliation.
Albert Camus
#46. She's so strong and fierce that I am afraid of her sometimes. But she's going to need to be fierce, because the path she is on is going to be so painful.
Alyssa Brugman
#47. But I don't write so much now, because they're too painful.
Bryan Ferry
#48. Rejections are painful, but inevitable. They're every writer's rite of passage.
Octavia Butler
#49. He had thought of love as a rapture which seized one so that all the world seemed spring-like, he had looked forward to an ecstatic happiness; but this was not happiness; it was a hunger of the soul, it was a painful yearning, it was a bitter anguish, he had never known before.
W. Somerset Maugham
#50. The suspicion that a rival is loved is painful enough already, but to have the love that he inspires in her confessed to one in detail by the woman whom one adores is without doubt the acme of suffering.
Stendhal
#51. Forging fake smiles to hide painful truths doesn't take away the hurt, but sometimes safeguards our emotions from those adamant not to understand.
Aisha Mirza
#52. Coming out was painful, but life got so much better for me.
Joel Burns
#53. This selfishness of your suicide displeased you. But, all things considered, the lull of death won out over life's painful commotion.
Edouard Leve
#54. Be grateful for holiness when you find it among churchmen, but do not expect it. As Flannery O'Connor wrote, "All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful. Priests resist it as well as others.
Rod Dreher
#55. I live in southern Appalachia, so I'm surrounded by people who work very hard for barely a living wage. It's particularly painful that people are working the farms their parents and grandparents worked but aren't living nearly as well.
Barbara Kingsolver
#56. A life outside of Christ is both hard and frightening; a life in Christ has hard edges and dark valleys, but it is purposeful even when painful.
Rosaria Champagne Butterfield
#57. I have in the past declared that in order to achieve a real, just and durable peace, I would be willing to make painful compromises. But we cannot make any compromise on the security of our citizens and their right to live without the threat of terrorism and violence.
Ariel Sharon
#58. Falling apart in a 5K is painful, but it's just pain. Falling apart in a marathon, I believe you lose a year of your life. You complete the marathon feeling utterly defeated, knowing that it got the best of you, and you go home and ask your mom if she still loves you.
Jacob Frey
#59. Hope come not from circumstances or the acquisition of things but from the simple accumulation of active experience, from gritting the teeth and checking the items off the list, one by one, even though it's painful and you're afraid.
Caroline Knapp
#60. Just remembering what you did in previous lives doesn't mean a thing. It's nice to remember that you had higher states of mind, but that won't necessarily get you there. It might even make things painful.
Frederick Lenz
#61. A person cries out in life because it's lonely and because life's been broken off from whatever created it. But no matter how much you hate life, you love it too. It's like a caldron boiling with everything you have to have, but very painful to the lips.
Frank Herbert
#62. I find playwriting really painful. I love it, or I wouldn't do it, but I don't love the theater as much as I love movies.
Zoe Kazan
#63. This practice of overstating the case is called hyperbole. Hyperbole is usually harmless, but in some cases it has been known to precipitate unnecessary wars as well as a painful gaseous condition called stock market bubbles.
Maryrose Wood
#64. I'd like to be invisible. To be anonymous and see things for what they really are. The truth may be painful but it's probably useful!
Marc Jacobs
#65. Never make a promise that you can't really keep it. But if you did in any case try to keep it anyway, whatever hard, troublesome or even painful.
Russ
#66. All seeing, I think, is painful. Every photograph is a little sting, a hurt inflicted in its subject, but even more: every glance hurts in some way, freezing and condensing what's seen into something that it is not.
James Elkins
#67. The downsides of globalization are indeed painful, ... But taking the bigger pills against its ills is superior to living inside a sterile bubble.
Joseph Estrada
#68. Lies can make harsh truths less painful. But I believe pain is essential for growth.
Morgan Rhodes
#69. Conscience can be painful but so can the cock-rot. A grown-up should suffer his afflictions privately and not allow them to become an inconvenience for friends and colleagues.' - The Magnificent Nicomo Cosca
Joe Abercrombie
#70. We don't seek the painful experiences that hew our identities, but we seek our identities in the wake of painful experiences.
Andrew Solomon
#71. Reality is painful
it's so much easier to keep doing stuff you know you're good at or else to pick something so hard there's no point at which it's obvious you're failing
but it's impossible to get better without confronting it.
Aaron Swartz
#72. There is much that I remember but which is painful to dwell on. I see no need to write about these things. They are over and must be accepted, made sense of and forgiven, afforded no more than their proper place in a long life in which I have always known that happiness is a gift, not a right.
P.D. James
#73. Painful truth is ineffable. It swings you around a couple of times until your dizzy, and then punches you hard in the stomach. You don't want to believe it, but it wouldn't hurt so badly if on some level you didn't know it was true.
Tarryn Fisher
#74. And there Allan could see an opening. In a prison camp you couldn't just hang around, because if you did then the guards would shoot you.
Herbert liked the idea, but it gave him the creeps at the same time. A load of bullets, wouldn't that be dreadfully painful?
Jonas Jonasson
#75. I maybe such a pain in the ass,
But in a good way.
I give you pleasure at the same time!
Arzum Uzun
#76. I know this is painful for the ladies to hear, but if you get married, you have accepted the headship of a man, your husband. Christ is the head of the household and the husband is the head of the wife, and that's the way it is, period.
Pat Robertson
#77. He wasn't sure how it would be, but
when Laurent saw who was beside him,
he smiled, the expression a
little shy but completely genuine.
Damen, who hadn't been expecting it,
felt the single painful beat of his heart.
He'd never thought Laurent could look
like that at anyone.
C.S. Pacat
#78. But love isn't a career. It isn't a degree you earn or a formula you pull out of a textbook. It's bumpy and blotched and painful and completely irreplaceable. Aren't there times when it might be better to let go? Sometimes the best part of life grows out of what you have no say over.
Carol Cassella
#79. The thought of writing was always pleasant, but the process was painful
Monica Ali
#80. I went to see Oliver Stone's 'Heaven & Earth,' which I thought was a wonderful movie, but I walked out because I was so moved. It was too painful to watch.
Jacqueline Bisset
#81. No matter; God wants Man, whom he has created and in whose heart he has so profoundly entrenched a love for life, to do all he can to preserve an existence that is sometimes so painful, but always so dear to him.
Alexandre Dumas
#82. So many people in the world would rather stay in a situation that's painful but familiar because they're comfortable with it. Not a lot of people have the strength or heart to realize when something's not good for them and to turn around and be alone.
Corey Taylor
#83. But maybe that's what the dead do. They stay. They linger. Benign and sweet and painful. They don't need us. They echo all by themselves.
Sangu Mandanna
#84. The damage was permanent; there would always be scars. But even the angriest scars faded over time until it was difficult to see them written on the skin at all, and the only thing that remained was the memory of how painful it had been.
Jodi Picoult
#85. Depression can seem absurdly self aggrandizing to those who do not experience it, But that does not make it any less painful to those who do.
Richard Brookhiser
#86. Great abilities, when employed as God directs, do but make the owners of them greater and more painful servants to their neighbors.
Jonathan Swift
#87. There is nothing between us but raw emotion, and it's painful yet has the sweet sting of addiction.
Penelope Fletcher
#88. I shake my head. I want to say no, but my legs move toward the god; my heart beats so fast that the unnoticeable movement becomes painful and unpleasant.
Cyci Cade
#89. This was a different kind of a kiss, not one that leads to something, but a hard, painful one.
It was a goodbye kiss.
Penelope Ward
#90. I learned a long time ago that some people would rather die than forgive. It's a strange truth, but forgiveness is a painful and difficult process. It's not something that happens overnight. It's an evolution of the heart.
Sue Monk Kidd
#91. So what Ghost Stories means to me is like, you've got to open yourself up to love and if you really do, of course it will be painful at times, but then it will be great at some point.
Chris Martin
#92. Because of the past, so many people are living in the past! No one is free from the past, but we are free to choose to move from the past into the present or stay in the past, though we live in the present!
Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
#93. Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other, and scarce in that.
Benjamin Franklin
#94. I don't know what a bike is but it sounds painful.
Mark Lawrence
#95. He should talk to her - not on the phone where so much could be hidden, but face to face. He wanted to see her. Look into her eyes, no matter how painful, and find the truth.
Jennifer Beckstrand
#96. I stopped going to mass, and boy, it was painful for me, and it was certainly painful for my family, but I just couldn't ratify their behavior and their decisions anymore by showing up on Sundays.
Anna Quindlen
#97. You may ... make a little recreation of poetry, in the midst of your painful studies. Nevertheless, I cannot but advise you. Withhold thy throat from thirst. Be not so set upon poetry, as to be always poring on the passionate and measured pages ... let not the Circean cup intoxicate you.
Cotton Mather
#98. Love - true love - is a precious thing. It is painful, uncomfortable, makes fools of us all, but it is what breathes meaning and color and purpose into our lives.
Kate Mosse
#99. But then, the flames of a fire are not made less painful by the knowledge that others are burning with you.
Karen Maitland
#100. Everyone has one or two secrets they never want to reveal to others. But they also want at least one person to accept everything about them ... no matter how they suffer or how painful it gets
Minari Endou
