Top 100 Life Is Suffering Quotes
#2. 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
#3. Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise.
George Orwell
#4. For those who trust, life is a blessing. For those who don't trust, life is suffering.
Debasish Mridha
#5. Life is suffering. Life is not resistance to suffering. The point of life is to suffer. This is why we're here: We're here to suffer. I believe in a higher power that compassionately allows suffering for us as a race, to grow and mature.
Rainn Wilson
#7. Siddhartha Gautama said that "life has dissatisfaction" (dukkha). He didn't say that "life is suffering and nothing but suffering" - only that we all suffer in larger or smaller ways.
Doug Kraft
#8. Life is suffering. Until the great day of judgement, when peace and equanimity may be restored for those who are pure of heart and deed.
John Boyne
#9. Without health life is not life; it is only a state of langour and suffering - an image of death.
Buddha
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. It is important to reignite our compassion for others because without it we will be lost in the sea of suffering
Radhe Maa
#14. We suffer because we want life to be different from what it is. We suffer because we try to make pleasurable what is painful, to make solid what is fluid, to make permanent what is always changing.
Sakyong Mipham
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. Never stop just because you feel defeated. The journey to the other side is attainable only after great suffering.
Santosh Kalwar
#20. For me, spirit is the impulse towards life, the Eros in a person leaping forward, whereas soul refers to something possibly long.. suffering, where meanings are made, where there is a sense of this gathering of perceptions, that our death is not the most important thing, nor our life.
Michael Leunig
#21. Submission to suffering is a form of annihilation, but transformation of suffering rekindles a faith that gives life.
Paulo Freire
#22. 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
#23. Life's pressure is equal to your resistance. Your grief has endless time. Your sadness is bottomless. Your worries are relentless. Your resentment is unquenchable. Your fears are unmovable. Every dimension of your suffering will instruct you, until you have learned your essential lessons.
Bryant McGill
#24. There is a day coming when all of the suffering, all of the maladies of this life are destroyed, when we, in our glorified bodies, will live in heaven, on the new earth, eternally fulfilling God's ordained purpose for us.
Paul P. Enns
#25. I do not understand how anyone can, in good conscience, tell a family whose child is suffering from a life-threatening disease that politics is more important than finding a cure.
Jim Doyle
#26. Pain is painful but an essential ingredient of life. Suffering is optional.
Debasish Mridha
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. No amount of security is worth the suffering of a life lived chained to a routine that has killed your dreams. I
Kent Nerburn
#30. Why is it...that the good things that pop up almost always get clobbered by these miserable darn things that seem to choke out everything like stinkweed?
A. E. Hotchner
#31. Pain is part of life. Suffering is an option.
Tony Robbins
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. A blow that would kill a civilized man soon heals on a savage. The higher we go in the scale of life, the greater is the capacity for suffering.
Dale Carnegie
#38. Caught in the self-centered dream, only suffering;
holding to self-centered thoughts, exactly the dream;
each moment, life as it is, the only teacher;
being just this moment, compassion's way.
Joko Beck
#39. 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
#40. There is little character or loveliness in the face of someone who has shunned risk, avoided suffering and rejected life
Madeleine L'Engle
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. Has all this suffering, this dying around us, a meaning? For, if not, then ultimately there is no meaning to survival; for a life whose meaning depends upon such a happenstance - as whether one escapes or not - ultimately would not be worth living at all.
Viktor E. Frankl
#44. Science itself, no matter whether it is the search for truth or merely the need to gain control over the external world, to alleviate suffering, or to prolong life, is ultimately a matter of feeling, or rather, of desire-the desire to know or the desire to realize.
Louis De Broglie
#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. 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
#49. As you pass through life pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional. Anon
Gemma Jackson
#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. 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
#52. 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
#53. When life is an existential suffering, death is our ultimate blessings.
Debasish Mridha
#54. Change is a good thing. It's good to have a fresh start, even if it's painful sometimes.
Jen Calonita
#55. All life is a breath exhaled by God. All dying is a breath inhaled by God.
Hermann Hesse
#57. To become the spectator of one's own life, as Harry says, is to escape the suffering of life. I
Oscar Wilde
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. 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
#63. 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
#64. Life is about discovering things worth dying for.
Criss Jami
#65. [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
#66. 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
#67. Persecution is one of the natural consequences of living the Christian life. It is to the Christian what "growing pains" are to the growing child. No pain, no development. No suffering, no glory. No struggle, no victory. No persecution, no reward!
Billy Graham
#68. 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
#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. To live a life which is a perpetual falsehood is to suffer unknown tortures.
Victor Hugo
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. A child without an acquaintance of some kind with a classic of literature ... suffers from that impoverishment for the rest of his life. No later intimacy is like that of the first.
Lizette Woodworth Reese
#79. I find God in the suffering eyes reflected in mine. I will always seek God. Some people find God in church. Some people find God in nature. Some people find God in love; I find God in suffering. I've known for some time what my life's work is, using my hands as tools to relieve suffering.
Kayla Mueller
#80. 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
#82. 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
#83. It often takes suffering and lost in order to remind us of how precious life is.
Rob Bell
#84. Suffering is normal. Pain is normal, it is part of life ... What is its texture, the weight of our suffering? What is its meaning? Begin by touching it, by coming close to it, accepting it: Hello, suffering, I am here with you. I am beside you, one with you, I am you. I am suffering.
A.M. Homes
#85. Since the dawn of time man understands that suffering, faced with no fear, is his passport to freedom.
Paulo Coelho
#86. The most wonderful things in life will be difficult. There is so shortcut, no easy way out. Success will be grueling. But the feeling that comes with it surpasses any pain, any suffering that you may endure on the way there.
Ally Peters
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. How you approach the problem of suffering depends on how you approach life itself. There are only two ways. Either meaning is surrounded by matter, or matter is surrounded by meaning.
Peter Kreeft
#91. Suffering can bend & break us. But it can also break us open to become the persons God intended us to be. It depends on what we do with the pain. If we offer it back to God, He will use it to do great things in us & through us, because suffering is fertile ... it an grow new life.
John Green
#92. Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?
John Keats
#93. 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
#94. The good news of suffering is that it brings us to the end of ourselves - a purpose it has certainly served in my life. It brings us to the place of honesty, which is the place of desperation, which is the place of faith, which is the place of freedom.
Tullian Tchividjian
#95. I am not interested in things getting better; what I want is more: more human beings, more dreams, more history, more consciousness, more suffering, more joy, more disease, more agony, more rapture, more evolution, more life.
David Zindell
#96. Suffering pain is what made you a woman. Most of the milestones in a woman's life were accompanied by pain, like her first time having sex or birthing a child. For men, it was all orgasms and champagne.
Brit Bennett
#97. There is no growth without pain. No life without suffering.
Cynthia Eden
#98. To know and believe in God is the best thing that can happen in your life because He can turn what appears to be the worst event into the best. He can transform your struggles into your learning. He can turn your suffering into strength. He can use your failures to bring success.
Nick Vujicic
#99. Suffering is how Life tells you that you are resisting or misperceiving what is real and true. It is the way Life suggests that you are not in harmony with what is.
Adyashanti
#100. All of our suffering in life is from saying we want one thing and doing another.
Debbie Ford
