Causes Suffering Quotes

#1. At an emotional level, we feel that things should be happy and when things are difficult or painful, something is wrong. According to the Buddhist teachings this is what causes suffering.

Krissy Pozatek

#2. The strain of trying to make another person change causes suffering for both.

Karlyle Tomms

#3. Look at the optimism of Nature. Nothing can stop it. Only the ego makes humans pessimistic, and this causes suffering.

Mata Amritanandamayi

#4. To be reserved, secretive, with a passionate violence that causes suffering.

Gwen John

#5. The safest and most suitable form of penance seems to be that which causes pain in the flesh but does not penetrate to the bones, that is, which causes suffering but not sickness.

Saint Ignatius

#6. He who causes suffering shall suffer. There is no escape.

Gautama Buddha

#7. Whatever religious people may say about their love of God or the mandates of their religion, when their behavior toward others is violent and destructive, when it causes suffering among their neighbors, you can be sure the religion has been corrupted and reform is desperately needed.

Charles Kimball

#8. I am a rebel by birth ... I contest anything that is unjust, that causes suffering in humanity . My feelings about that are so strong, I don't think I could live with myself if I weren't honest .

Yip Harburg

#9. The Buddha never intended to make desire itself the problem. When he said craving causes suffering, he was referring not to our natural inclination as living beings to have wants and needs, but to our habit of clinging to experience that must, by nature, pass away.

Tara Brach

#10. Question every thought that causes suffering and test it against your own sense of truth.

Martha Beck

#11. To become spiritual, you must die to self, and come alive in the Lord. Only then will the mysteries of God fall from your lips. To die to self through self-discipline causes suffering but brings you everlasting life.

Rumi

#12. I don't hold to the idea that God causes suffering and crisis. I just know that those things come along and God uses them. We think life should be a nice, clean ascending line. But inevitably something wanders onto the scene and creates havoc with the nice way we've arranged life to fall in place.

Sue Monk Kidd

#13. What actually causes suffering are the beliefs you hold about those things.

Oliver Burkeman

#14. The appearances of the world are not the problem,
it's clinging to them that causes suffering

Tilopa

#15. Hard it is to train the mind, which goes where it likes and does what it wants. An unruly mind suffers and causes suffering whatever it does. But a well-trained mind brings health and happiness.

Anonymous

#16. Any story that you tell about yourself causes suffering. There is no authentic story.

Byron Katie

#17. The second noble truth says that resistance is the fundamental operating mechanism of what we call ego, that resisting life causes suffering.

Pema Chodron

#18. Grief causes suffering and disease.

Daniel D. Palmer

#19. A thought is harmless unless we believe it. It's not our thoughts, but our attachment to our thoughts, that causes suffering. Attaching to a thought means believing that it's true, without inquiring. A belief is a thought that we've been attaching to, often for years.

Byron Katie

#20. As we increasingly become aware of the One Life breathing in each brother form of life, we learn the meaning of compassion, which literally means to 'suffer with' ... How does [the] self cause the desire which causes suffering? ... by the illusion of separateness, the unawareness of One.

Christmas Humphreys

#21. It is our very search for perfection outside of ourselves that causes suffering.

Gautama Buddha

#22. We, we, and none else, are responsible for what we suffer. We are the effects, and we are the causes.

Swami Vivekananda

#23. Resisting what is happening is a major cause of suffering,

Pema Chodron

#24. We who are like senseless children shrink from suffering, but love its causes. We hurt ourselves; our pain is self-inflicted! Why should others be the object of our anger?

Santideva

#25. Pacifism as a mass movement aims to avoid suffering; pacifists often say that no cause is worth suffering or dying for. The ethos of Solidarity is based on an opposite premise - that there are causes worth suffering and dying for.

Adam Michnik

#26. Confuse not love with the raptures of possession, which bring the cruellest of sufferings. For, notwithstanding the general opinion, love does not cause suffering: what causes it is the sense of ownership, which is love's opposite.

Antoine De Saint-Exupery

#27. It may be providence's will that the cause I represent may prosper more by my suffering than by my remaining free.

Bal Gangadhar Tilak

#28. Suffering begins when you mentally label a situation as bad. That causes an emotional contraction. When you let it be, without naming it, enormous power is available to you. The contraction cuts you off from that power, the power of life itself.

Eckhart Tolle

#29. Of course we all suffer,' Priya often told her. 'But if you cling to suffering or fight it then it will hold on like a rat. If you accept it's existence and the pain it causes you, then you can release it'.

Kate Elliott

#30. The avoidance of that which causes you pain does not produce enlightenment. It produces avoidance. Religion is the avoidance of pain and suffering.

Frederick Lenz

#31. The reason Scripture doesn't give clear guidelines for assigning responsibility is that it is not essential for us to know precise causes. This is good news: you don't have to know the exact cause of suffering in order to find hope and comfort.

Edward T. Welch

#32. Understand the suffering of worldly existence.
Abandon its causes of ignorance and selfishness.
Practice the path of meditation and compassion.
Awaken from suffering within Great Peace.

Gautama Buddha

#33. We hate suffering, but love it's causes.

Santideva

#34. We are close to a time when all of humankind will envision a global agenda that encompasses a kind of Global Marshall Plan to address the causes of poverty and suffering and environmental destruction all over the earth.

Al Gore

#35. A cold in the head causes less suffering than an idea.

Jules Renard

#36. By acquiescing in an act that causes such suffering to a living creature, who among us is not diminished?

Rachel Carson

#37. 'Freedom.' He pauses a moment to reflect on the F-word. 'Sometimes I think it's an idea that enslaves us. We're never free from hungering for the notion that we can even have freedom. When perhaps it's the very idea of it that causes us to suffer.

Rachel Cohn

#38. After all, all human beings are the same - made up of flesh, bone, and blood. We all want happiness, and we all try to avoid suffering. We are the members of one single human family, and our arguments are born from secondary causes. Disputes, lies, and killings are useless.

Dalai Lama XIV

#39. We make a picture," he said, "of how we want the world to be, and most of the time it isn't like that. Holding on to that image causes the suffering. Not the world, not the truth. Our disappointment is what makes us hurt.

M.L.N. Hanover

#40. It isn't what happens to us that causes us to suffer; it's what we say to ourselves about what happens.

Pema Chodron

#41. I always say neediness is the cause of suffering. I'm not the only one who says it. It's something I adopted and I believe.

Russell Simmons

#42. It is impossible to control outcomes or results, although most of us have been programmed from a very young age to believe otherwise. The idea that we can perform actual 'magic' causes tremendous dysfunction, unnecessary suffering and prevents the development of emotional resilience.

Christopher Dines

#43. Embrace suffering, and you transform your relationship with what causes you to suffer, as well as your relationship with suffering itself.

Adyashanti

#44. Everyone suffers, and the causes of suffering are always internal.

Karuna Cayton

#45. Action arising out of suffering is contaminated with suffering and causes further suffering, and that is karma. Action that arises out of a state of "acceptance" is totally free of karma. And there is a vast difference.

Eckhart Tolle

#46. Who is it that loves and who that suffers? He alone stages a play with Himself; who exists save Him? The individual suffers because he perceives duality. It is duality which causes all sorrow and grief. Find the One everywhere and in everything and there will be an end to pain and suffering.

Anandamayi Ma

#47. The only cause of happiness is love. The only cause of suffering is self grasping.

Garchen Rinpoche

#48. Sometimes, truth causes pain and suffering. At such times, silence is preferred.

Amish Tripathi

#49. A morbid propensity that causes great suffering in domestic life is often curiously infectious to the very person for whom it creates most suffering.

Ada Leverson

#50. If one cannot change a situation that causes his suffering, he can still choose his attitude.

Viktor E. Frankl

#51. It's not the problem that causes our suffering; it's our thinking about the problem.

Byron Katie

#52. Small does of advertising result in nothing, obviously. It's like giving a sick person half the medicine he needs. It just causes more suffering. Give the whole dose, and the cure will be certain and decisive.

P.T. Barnum

#53. My aim in helping the patient was not to cause death. My aim was to end suffering. It's got to be decriminalized.

Jack Kevorkian

#54. All suffering is caused by the illusion of separateness, which generates fear and self-hatred, which eventually causes illness. You are the master of your life. You can do much more than you thought you could, including cure yourself of a "terminal illness".

Barbara Brennan

#55. My illness is excruciating and difficult to cope with. It takes over your entire life and causes more suffering than I can describe.

Laura Hillenbrand

#56. Suffering has clear causes in your brain and body, so if you change its causes, you'll suffer a lot less. And you can change those causes.

Rick Hanson

#57. Helping others is not limited to providing food, shelter, and so forth, but includes relieving the basic causes of suffering and providing the basic causes of happiness.

Dalai Lama

#58. Wounded parents often unintentionally inflict pain and suffering on their children and these childhood wounds causes a laundry list of maladaptive behaviors commonly called codependency. These habits restrict people to love-limiting relationships causing much unhappiness and distress.

David W. Earle

#59. Pause and remember - Making the wrong assumptions causes pain and suffering for everyone.

Jennifer Young

#60. Crying comes from many sources and has many causes: anger, frustration, sadness, lack of sleep. I think I am suffering from all four, and I think that is why I have been crying.

Craig Lancaster

#61. Identification with your mind, which causes thought to become compulsive. Not to be able to stop thinking is a dreadful affliction, but we don't realize this because almost everybody is suffering from it, so it is considered normal.

Eckhart Tolle

#62. It is the worst humiliation and grievance of the suffering, that they cause suffering.

Harriet Martineau

#63. Avoiding pain causes endless suffering for you and others. Avoiding pain is really selfishness.

Bryant McGill

#64. Love is a certain inborn suffering derived from the sight of and excessive meditation upon the beauty of the opposite sex, which causes each one to wish above all things the embraces of the other and by common desire to carry out all of love's precepts in the other's embrace.

Andreas Capellanus

#65. Why should one ever get pain? One is the Absolute Supreme Self (parmatma), how can one have any pain? It is the egoism that causes pain and it is also the egoism that suffers the pain! The absolute Supreme Self doesn't have any suffering!

Dada Bhagwan

#66. There is a correlation between the physical and spiritual worlds but only attachment to the physical world causes emotional suffering.

Daniel Marques

#67. When the suffering of another creature causes you to feel pain, do not submit to the initial desire to flee from the suffering one, but on the contrary, come closer, as close as you can to her who suffers, and try to help her.

Leo Tolstoy

#68. The main cause of suffering is egoistic desire for one's own comfort and happiness.

Dalai Lama

#69. Happiness and suffering are states of mind, and so their main causes cannot be found outside the mind.

Geshe Kelsang Gyatso

#70. Even if I have to do it alone, I will free all sentient beings from suffering and the causes of suffering, and set all sentient beings in happiness and its causes.

Dalai Lama XIV

#71. You have no fixed self. This is only an illusion that causes you to feel pain and suffering.

Frederick Lenz

#72. Be mobile at all times, even if it causes you suffering or feelings of loneliness. Unless you're willing to do that, you're never going to get the bigger rewards.

Oleg Cassini

#73. We all hate pain and suffering but nothings causes humanity to progress quicker than it!

Timothy Pina

#74. Without enlightenment, everything in life is harsh. Sooner or later you see everyone you love die, unless you die first, of course. This causes you to suffer.

Frederick Lenz

#75. The ability to understand the cause of your own suffering gives you the ability to understand ours.

Byron Katie

#76. There is in Aristotle an almost complete absence of what may be called benevolence or philanthropy. The sufferings of mankind ... there is no evidence that they cause him unhappiness except when the sufferers happen to be his friends.

Bertrand Russell

#77. Desire, said the Buddha, is the cause of suffering. But without desire, what delight?

Edward Abbey

#78. Too much verbal stimulation causes the work to suffer.

Gene Black

#79. Self-destructive patterns cause as much suffering as outer catastrophes.

Anais Nin

#80. Not knowing about the ultimate purpose of our lives causes tremendous amounts of suffering.

Debasish Mridha

#81. The sight or sound of perfect things causes a certain suffering.

Adrienne Monnier

#82. Happiness and suffering are feelings - parts of our mind - and so their main causes are not to be found outside the mind. If we really want to be truly happy and free from suffering, we must improve our understanding of the mind.

Kelsang Gyatso

#83. There is no way to be in cyclic existence without creating the causes of suffering.

Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

#84. Being asked to support humane meat means being asked to support the suffering of animals in transport, to approve of treatment that causes them palpable fear, their bodies shaking and their eyes wide as saucers, as they are slung by their legs into crates that are slammed onto the back of a truck.

Ingrid Newkirk

#85. Everything is unfolding based on causes and conditions. Our happiness or suffering is dependent on how we relate to the present moment. If we cling now, we suffer later. If we let go and respond with compassion or friendliness, we create happiness and well-being for the future.

Noah Levine

#86. A central problem with the idea that wars are needed to combat evil is that there is nothing more evil than war. War causes more suffering and death than anything war can be used to combat.

David Swanson

#87. We all have the ability to study the causes of suffering and gradually to free ourselves from them ... it is not the magnitude of the task that matters, it's the magnitude of our courage.

Matthieu Ricard

#88. One can traverse the Eastern paths simply by becoming interested in the nature of one's own mind - especially in the immediate causes of psychological suffering - and by paying closer attention to one's experience in every present moment. There is, in truth, nothing one need believe.

Sam Harris

#89. It is ignorance that smothers, and it is carelessness that makes it invisible. The hunger of craving pollutes the world, and the pain of suffering causes the greatest fear.

Gautama Buddha