Top 100 Life And Suffering Quotes
#1. It does not follow that the meaning must be given from above; that life and suffering must come neatly labeled; that nothing is worth while if the world is not governed by a purpose.
Walter Kaufmann
#2. And we know there has been horrendous loss of life and suffering and we know that there is anger. Anyone who came anywhere near the general election in constituencies with a substantial Muslim population knows that.
Clare Short
#3. It is only possible through the fact that sympathy for the general life and suffering of mankind is very weakly developed in the individual.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#4. Without health life is not life; it is only a state of langour and suffering - an image of death.
Buddha
#5. It is true that I have had heartache and tragedy in my life. These are things none of us avoids. Suffering is the price of being alive.
Judy Collins
#6. I am not knocking advances that provide a healthier life and alleviate suffering or unnecessary premature death. I am advocating inclusion of education on end-of-life matters and the promotion of understanding, conversation, and planning.
Lisa J. Shultz
#7. To know that children are suffering and going without food is intolerable in a society such as ours. I hope that all our leaders, in both the public and private sectors, will work tirelessly to eradicate hunger. We all have a responsibility to bring back life to our most precious natural resource.
Joan Lunden
#8. For the life of the believer, one thing is beautifully and abundantly true: God's chief concern in your suffering is to be with you and be Himself for you. And in the end, what we discover is that this really is enough.
Tullian Tchividjian
#9. It is important to reignite our compassion for others because without it we will be lost in the sea of suffering
Radhe Maa
#10. The human soul, by once suffering as much as it is capable of, purchases a strange and terrible immunity to all the rest of life's sorrows.
Agnes Sligh Turnbull
#11. To love life is to love God. Harder and more blessed than all else is to love this life in one's sufferings, in undeserved sufferings.
Leo Tolstoy
#12. I was so afraid to feel free to enjoy my own life if my mother was sick and suffering everyday of her's. I didn't think I had the right.
Gene Wilder
#13. All your stress, pain, suffering, misery is due to your attachment with it. If you don't attach with the things, that doesn't serve you, either in your internal or external life, slowly those things lose grip on you, and you release yourself from it forever.
Roshan Sharma
#14. My heart longs for the day when there will be no more suffering, no more hatred or violence, only love and a child will be able to grow up in a world without ever having to know the pain and anguish of an empty belly.
Heather Wolf
#15. Nothing is altered and in spite of God's mercy I am still alone. Though my suffering seems senseless I am still in agony. There is no explanation of my life. Indeed there was not, nor was this what he'd meant to convey.
Malcolm Lowry
#16. Let us be the hope for those who are suffering.
Let us be the eyesight for those who are blind.
Let us show the way, nonjudgmental and kind.
Debasish Mridha
#17. The happy and the suffering probably understand life equally well, but the sufferers may see a little more clearly how little it is that they understand.
James Richardson
#18. Love ... includes fellowship in suffering, in joy and in effort.
Albert Schweitzer
#19. With wrong people, there has to be a choice, to stay with them and go down with them or reject them and suffer alone.
Auliq Ice
#20. He was hurting, and I hurt with him. We had never been able to maintain any level of detachment from each other's suffering, and we
didn't now.
R.K. Lilley
#21. We get sufferings in life so that we become sober and listen to Krishna's message.
Radhanath Swami
#22. We can discover this meaning in life in three different ways: 1. by doing a deed; 2. by experiencing a value; and 3. by suffering.
Viktor E. Frankl
#23. Pity can be nearsighted and condescending; shared suffering can be dignifying and life-changing.
Eugene H. Peterson
#24. Creating - that is the great salvation from suffering, and life's alleviation. But for the creator to appear, suffering itself is needed, and much transformation.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#25. What makes a genius? The ability to see. To see what? The butterfly in a caterpillar, the eagle in an egg, the saint in a selfish person, life in death, unity in separation,
God in the human and human in God and suffering as the form in which the incomprehensibility of God himself appears.
Brennan Manning
#26. We want to avoid suffering, death, sin, ashes. But we live in a world crushed and broken and torn, a world God Himself visited to redeem. We receive his poured-out life, and being allowed the high privilege of suffering with Him, may then pour ourselves out for others.
Elisabeth Elliot
#27. Do not base your life on the likings and dislikings or whims of others. What you are in life - whether you enjoy or suffer - it is your own responsibility. Be regular in your meditation and do not postpone for a later date your striving for God consciousness.
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi
#28. The prime goal is to alleviate suffering, and not to prolong life. And if your treatment does not alleviate suffering, but only prolongs life, that treatment should be stopped.
Christiaan Barnard
#29. The call of Christ is a call to live a life of sacrifice and loss and suffering
a life that would be foolish to live if there were no resurrection from the dead.
John Piper
#30. I never got that show - Les Miz. It's about the French guy, right, who steals a loaf of bread, and then he suffers for the rest of his life. For Toast. Get over it!
Paul Rudnick
#31. Attachment strangles freedom and clarity and makes us a puppet to our desires and cravings; attachment is the root of suffering, a root that if left unattended grows into a tree which drops the fruits of anger, greed, envy, dispersion, competitiveness, ego and pain
Evan Sutter
#32. John Hay points to our our history of getting lost in suffering when, "so close together were pain and antidote.
John Taliaferro
#33. You must remember that no one lives a life free from pain and suffering.
Sophocles
#34. By changing our inner state of mind, we can change any suffering or hardship into a source of joy, regarding it as a means for forging and developing our lives. To turn even sorrow into a source of creativity - this is the way of life of a Buddhist
Daisaku Ikeda
#35. Contrary to what we may have been taught to think, unnecessary and unchosen suffering wounds us but need not scar us for life. It does mark us. What we allow the mark of our suffering to become is in our own hands.
Bell Hooks
#36. One must choose in life between boredom and suffering.
Madame De Stael
#37. How many years of fatigue and punishment it takes to learn the simple truth that work, that disagreeable thing, is the only way of not suffering in life, or at all events, of suffering less.
Charles Baudelaire
#38. There is little character or loveliness in the face of someone who has shunned risk, avoided suffering and rejected life
Madeleine L'Engle
#39. Why wait? So precious is this life - this gift - this temporary blindness. Burn and drown and embrace the false dark, then grasp the unthinkable height of resulting joy. For in the end, in the light of truth when the flesh is cast off, there is nothing but this.
Jennifer DeLucy
#40. We have a choice. We can spend our whole life suffering because we can't relax with how things really are, or we can relax and embrace the open-endedness of the human situation, which is fresh, unfixated, unbiased.
Pema Chodron
#41. My mother was suffering every day of her life, and what right did I have to be happy if she was suffering? So whenever I got happy about something, I felt the need to cut it off, and the only way to cut it off was to pray. 'Forgive me Lord.' For what, I didn't know.
Gene Wilder
#42. The Scriptures teach us the best way of living, the noblest way of suffering, and the most comfortable way of dying.
John Flavel
#43. Observing life, living through it. As you experience life some events call upon you to suffer through them and that's what brings inspiration.
Andrey Zvyagintsev
#44. I owe it all to words and art, the peace that came with a flicker of a pen silenced the suffering; eased the pain and life that was once filled with burden became sane again. It Became meaningful.
Art does matter, it made me, when the world changed me.
Nikki Rowe
#45. The greatest tragedy of life is that, having paid that awful price of suffering "according to the flesh that his bowels might be filled with compassion," and being now prepared to reach down and help us, he is forbidden because we won't let him. We look down instead of up.
Truman G. Madsen
#46. From suffering to suffering, he had gradually arrived at the conviction that life is a war; and that in this war he was the conquered.
Victor Hugo
#47. The purpose of forgiveness is not to make sure that someone ends up changing into what you expect them to be, as this is dominance. The purpose is actually to make your own life better, more worthy and less stressful. Forgiveness reduces the hold that the wrongdoer has over you and empowers you.
Stephen Richards
#48. God has never promised a life without suffering, but He has promised to comfort us and give us the strength to carry on. He has also promised to work good out of everything that happens to us if we love Him and continue wanting His will in our lives (Rom. 8:28).
Joyce Meyer
#49. Is there another Life? Shall I awake and find all this a dream? There must be we cannot be created for this sort of suffering.
John Keats
#50. I wrote the song "Show Me" as a prayer to God asking simple, honest questions about life and death and why there is so much suffering in the world. As I grew with the song I realized I shouldn't limit these questions solely to God; I should ask those questions of others and of myself.
John Legend
#51. If we do the work with the intention to grow and be beneficial to others rather than use the work as a means for getting the next buzz in life, we'll live in contentment rather than suffering.
Cameron Alborzian
#52. Where no guiding ideals are left to point the way, the scale of values disappears and with it the meaning of our deeds and sufferings, and at the end can lie only negation and despair. Religion is therefore the foundation of ethics, and ethics the presupposition of life.
Werner Heisenberg
#53. Is to throw together events from my own life, fictionalizing to add color - it's a pot boiler really, but I think it will show how isolated a person feels when he is suffering a breakdown ... I've tried to picture my world and the people in it as seen through the distorting lens of a bell jar.
Sylvia Plath
#54. When life is rosy, we may slide by with knowing about Jesus, with imitating him and quoting him and speaking of him. But only in suffering will we know Jesus.
Joni Eareckson Tada
#55. Being on the path means we again meditate with joy. We deal with the suffering of life and the pain of existence without perfect enlightenment with a smile.
Frederick Lenz
#56. Show me a god that does not demand mortal suffering.
Show me a god that celebrates diversity, a celebration that embraces even non-believers, and is not threatened by them.
Show me a god that understands the meaning of peace. In life, not in death.
Steven Erikson
#57. Confidence is a life ingredient that is essential to success and wholeness. It is perhaps the single most important trait that enables seemingly average people to do and become all that they can. And the good news is - it can be learned. No one has to suffer a lifetime of low confidence.
Steve Goodier
#58. You see, what I want is life. A real life, full of moments of joy, of anguish, of irritation, of fun. A life with an end point, which makes each second important. A life that is full of love, that doesn't cause suffering and pain.
Gemma Malley
#59. I envy these people. Wide-open suffering, their messes all hanging out. Lives boiled down to raw need--a near-holiness to it. And all of us driving our cars up and down the mountain--we'll go on forever trying to fool each other.
Jamie Quatro
#60. Be a human angel! With love, generosity and kindness, let us lighten the burden of suffering from humanity.
Debasish Mridha
#61. The suffering was shaping her perception about life, her values, priorities, goals and dreams.
A.A. Gupte
#62. The whole art of living is to regard people who cause us suffering as, in a degree, enabling us to accept its divine form and thus to populate our daily life with divinities.
Marcel Proust
#63. [Art is] very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone. This is why art is important. Art would not be important if life were not important, and life is important.
James Baldwin
#64. Altruism does not mean mere kindness or generosity, but the sacrifice of the best among men to the worst, the sacrifice of virtues to flaws, of ability to incompetence, of progress to stagnation-and the subordinating of all life and of all values to the claims of anyone's suffering.
Ayn Rand
#65. Among its many other obligations, fiction always has to be believable. Life does not have to suffer such constraint, and much of what takes place is believable only because it happens.
John McGahern
#66. We can react with bitterness and hate God, as some do, or we can accept suffering as a natural part of life and a condition that comes with living in this world. We cannot avoid suffering, but we can determine our response to it.
Billy Graham
#67. We're each given one life, and it's our job to make it useful, beautiful, and fulfilling. There is no value in suffering through it, doing something we hate. There's no prize at the end for that kind of endurance. Just a spent life.
Sarah Jio
#68. I began to understand that suffering and disappointments and melancholy are there not to vex us or cheapen us or deprive us of our dignity but to mature and transfigure us.
Hermann Hesse
#69. Disillusionment means having no more misconceptions, false impressions, and false judgments in life; it means being free from these deceptions. Refusing to be disillusioned is the cause of much of the suffering of human life.
Oswald Chambers
#70. The story depicts also the troubled part of the hero's life which precedes and leads up to his death; and an instantaneous death occurring by 'accident' in the midst of prosperity would not suffice for it. It is, in fact, essentially a tale of suffering and calamity conducting to death.
A. C. Bradley
#71. Life is a " vale of tears" a period of trial and suffering, an unpleasant but necessary preparation for the afterlife where alone man could expect to enjoy happiness - Archibald T. MacAllister (The Inferno; Dante Alighieri translated by John Ciardi)
Dante Alighieri
#72. Am reading the life of Mozart and cannot help thinking that one's capacity for suffering is in direct proportion to one's greatness.
Lily Koppel
#73. Our true friends are those who are with us when the good things happen. They cheer us on and are pleased by our triumphs. False friends only appear at difficult times, with their sad, supportive faces, when, in fact, our suffering is serving to console them for their miserable lives.
Paulo Coelho
#74. Suffering is not enough. Life is both dreadful and wonderful ... How can I smile when I am filled with so much sorrow? It is natural
you need to smile to your sorrow because you are more than your sorrow.
Thich Nhat Hanh
#75. He was a phoenix of blood, rising from the ashes of those who had fallen and suffered before him.
Nenia Campbell
#76. The only tyrannies from which men, women and children are suffering in real life are the tyrannies of minorities.
Theodore Roosevelt
#77. God has hewn out a hidden path more glorious, tantalizing and adventuresome than the path trod by most, and it is a path seen only through the eyes of our wounds, felt solely through the heart of our losses, and singularly traversed by those with a limp in their step.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#78. If we have been brought up with the idea that life is for suffering and sacrifice, then of course we would seek death to escape this 'vale of tears'.
Claude Vorilhon
#79. Without a word or hesitation, Pain took the mop from Nick. Suffering moved to pick up glass.
"Wow. Where have you two been all my life?"
Pain quirked and eyebrow as he mopped the floor.
"Walking hand in hand with you. Haven't you noticed?
Sherrilyn Kenyon
#80. And then you discover what you should have known all along: that it takes only one bad day to turn your life upside down. That there's nothing you can have, nothing you've earned, nothing you've paid for with blood and loss and suffering ... that the world can't take away from you.
Simon R. Green
#81. So does he live, seeking, finding, joying and suffering.
Kate Chopin
#82. Suddenly you're ripped into being alive. And life is pain, and life is suffering, and life is horror, but my god you're alive and its spectacular.
Joseph Campbell
#83. In this life, the proper way of living is to make use of both joy and suffering. They are both merely stimuli that the world presents to us. So by blending them skillfully within you, you can use them in a completely different way. If you want to be steeped in evil, you mustn't forget good.
Fuminori Nakamura
#85. Painting completed my life. I lost three children and a series of other things that would have fulfilled my horrible life. My painting took the place of all this. I think work is the best. (Frida Kahlo, p. 157)
Martha Zamora
#86. It often takes suffering and lost in order to remind us of how precious life is.
Rob Bell
#87. If you wake up for a moment and look around at life, you will observe that nothing here lasts, nothing works out. There are no happy endings. All accomplishments are washed away by death or by the next moment.
Frederick Lenz
#88. Climate change will affect the basic elements of life for people around the world - access to water, food production, health, and the environment. Hundreds of millions of people could suffer hunger, water shortages and coastal flooding as the world warms
Nicholas Stern
#89. The seeming imperfections of Earth, the hazards and inequalities of life, the cruelty, harshness and apparent indifference to suffering and affliction are not what they seem; as it is Earth is perfect for its purpose. It is ignorance of that purpose which makes it appear imperfect.
Kolbrin BIble
#90. In suffering, you've found a greater understanding and appreciation for all of life's wonders. You're still trying to believe it every day. One morning you convince yourself it will all be worth it, the next you're down and believe it all to be worthless.
Connor Franta
#91. I never knew I could suffer so much. And then, at the same time, you think, now I'm ready to open myself up to life in another way, to make it worth something and make it about the right things and not waste time.
Gwyneth Paltrow
#92. I am convinced, the longer I live, that life and its blessings are not so entirely unjustly distributed as when we are suffering greatly we are inclined to suppose.
Mary Todd Lincoln
#93. Time and sunshine healed a sore, but the process was slow, and new boils appeared if I didn't stay dry.
Yann Martel
#94. Only two things can reveal life's great secrets: suffering and love.
Paulo Coelho
#95. The reason for the emphasis on shamanism and on other techniques is, you will need techniques if you go into the deep water. And they can make your life very simple and save you from unnecessary suffering. Not all suffering is necessary. Maybe no suffering is necessary.
Terence McKenna
#96. 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
#97. Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?
John Keats
#98. I didn't mean to scare you. I'm not suicidal if that's what's freaking you out. I'm not fucked up in the head. I'm not deranged. I'm not suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. I'm just a brother who loved his sister more than life itself, so I get a little intense when I think about her.
Colleen Hoover
#99. Rather let your longing be to glorify God by your life down here as long as He pleases, even though you live in the midst of toil and conflict and suffering. Leave Him to say when it is enough.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
#100. Peace does not dwell in outward things but within the soul; we may preserve it in the midst of the bitterest pain, if our will remains firm and submissive. Peace in this life springs from acquiescence to, not an exemption from, suffering.
Francois Fenelon