Quotes About Human Suffering

#1. Surely there was something taught her by this experience of great need; and she must be learning a secret of human tenderness and long-suffering, that the less erring could hardly know?

George Eliot

#2. How can you admire a human who consciously embraces the bland, the mediocre, and the safe rather than risk the suffering that disappointment can bring?

Tom Robbins

#3. Whatever the capacity for human suffering, the church has a greater capacity for healing and wholeness.

Bill Hybels

#4. At present, I am mainly observing the physical motion of mountains, water, trees and flowers. One is everywhere reminded of similar movements in the human body, of similar impulses of joy and suffering in plants.

Egon Schiele

#5. That someone would want another human being to suffer, or would even tolerate the idea, for committing no crime at all but being reasonable, is truly frightening. A religion that breeds such people is a genuine plague upon the earth.

Richard Carrier

#6. 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

#7. Humanity as a whole has already gone through unimaginable suffering, mostly self-inflicted, the culmination of which was the 20th century with its unspeakable horrors. This collective suffering has brought upon a readiness in many human beings for the evolutionary leap that is spiritual awakening.

Eckhart Tolle

#8. The human birthright includes the possibility of an easy death at extreme old age if we are healthy. Alternatively, we may experience a lot of disease, but with medical intervention probably live almost as long, suffering from suboptimum health all the way through. It's our choice.

Steve Solomon

#9. The pain on the inside is what keeps you human,' she said. 'Never forget that.

Taylor Stevens

#10. When you see around you the human form suffering or dissolving, you have empathy on the human level. You share the suffering because it has to do with the fleetingness of form. But if that is the only level that operates in you, you haven't gone beyond suffering.

Eckhart Tolle

#11. Every war, every plague is God's judgment. But every man who rises up to stop the wars and the plagues is God's instrument. Human action is God's will, not blind indifference in the face of suffering.

John Kramer

#12. Our human compassion binds us the one to the other - not in pity or patronizingly, but as human beings who have learnt how to turn our common suffering into hope for the future. -Nelson Mandela

Michael Gallegos Borresen

#13. The First World War was a horror of gas, industrialised slaughter, fear, and appalling human suffering.

Nick Harkaway

#14. My own view is that being a vegetarian or vegan is not an end in itself, but a means towards reducing both human and animal suffering and leaving a habitable planet to future generations.

Peter Singer

#15. [In-group exclusivism has] killed more human beings and destroyed more cities and villages than all the epidemics, hurricanes, storms, floods, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions taken together. It has brought upon mankind more suffering than any other catastrophe.

Pitirim Sorokin

#16. 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

#17. What is the greatest deficiency among human Chrsitians? They have an inadequate view of human suffering.

Helmut Thielicke

#18. Nothing is more important than empathy for another human being's suffering. Nothing. Not a career, not wealth, not intelligence, certainly not status. We have to feel for one another if we're going to survive with dignity.

Audrey Hepburn

#19. Peter was struck by the scar's essential nature: it was not a disfigurement, it was a miracle. All the scars ever suffered by anyone in the whole of human history were not suffering but triumph: triumph against decay, triumph against death.

Michel Faber

#20. Think of all the human suffering caused by the sad truth that beautiful sexy women or handsome Porsche-owning men often prove to have miserable genes for other traits

Jared Diamond

#21. We're all afraid of suffering or agony or torture. It's only natural in some ways. It's only human, let's say. I don't know how natural it is. It probably is conditioning.

SARK

#22. The idea that we have the right to inflict suffering and death on other sentient beings for the trivial reasons of palate pleasure and fashion is, without doubt, one of the most arrogant and morally repugnant notions in the history of human thought.

Gary L. Francione

#23. 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

#24. I am persuaded that normal human beings are biologically built for an activity that is aimed toward a goal and that idleness, or aimless work (like Auschwitz's Arbeit), gives rise to suffering and to atrophy.

Primo Levi

#25. In the East, especially in contemplative traditions like those of Buddhism, being distracted by thought is understood to be the very wellspring of human suffering.

Sam Harris

#26. Suffering is inevitable. It is part of the human condition. It is written in the human script.

Johnny Rich

#27. Human beings are not so in harmony with the dharma. That is why they suffer so much. But you as an individual can reach a plane of attention and can become attention itself.

Frederick Lenz

#28. The role of the human brain was to rationalize suffering.

Maile Meloy

#29. 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

#30. A Jew must be sensitive to the pain of all human beings. A Jew cannot remain indifferent to human suffering ... The mission of the Jewish people has never been to make the world more Jewish, but to make it more human.

Elie Wiesel

#31. 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

#32. Our sufferings and weaknesses, in so far as they are personal, are of no literary interest whatsoever. They are only interesting in so far as we can see them as typical of the human condition.

W. H. Auden

#33. Half the human race can change its name and sometimes its nation without suffering - at least half! All women!

Jean Giraudoux

#34. The way we treat animals is the root cause of all the human suffering in the world, from poverty, starvation, disease, and war to lack of clean air and water, not to mention all the varied forms of human emotional and spiritual suffering.

Sharon Gannon

#35. The relief of suffering is a great good. The curing of illness and disease - these are great human goods. This is the mission of medicine.

Michael Sandel

#36. He who is indifferent to the suffering of others is a traitor to that which is truly human.

Saadi

#37. Love has three kinds of origin, namely: suffering, friendship and love. A human love has a corporal and intellectual origin.

Boethius

#38. You have to suffer in order to be a human being who can help people understand suffering.

Nicholson Baker

#39. The artist cannot hold back; it is impossible, because writing, or any other discipline of art, involves participation in suffering, in the ills and the occasional stabbing joys that come from being part of the human drama.

Madeleine L'Engle

#40. We all want a world without war, without conflict, without human suffering.

Jeremy Gilley

#41. The indifference, callousness, and contempt that so many people exhibit toward animals is evil first because it results in great suffering towards animals, and second because it results in an incalculably great impoverishment of human spirit.

Ashley Montagu

#42. Compassion is a beautiful grace that releases hate and fearful emotions. Through the power of compassion, when put in delicate circumstances with dysfunctional human beings, rather than loathing their behaviour, you can be compassionate to their internal suffering and love them unconditionally.

Christopher Dines

#43. Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable ... Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#44. Seneca describes this in an extraordinary passage, in which he astutely observes that most human suffering relates to rumination about the past or worry about the future, and that nobody confines his concern to the present moment.

Anonymous

#45. Rather, genuine compassion is based on the rationale that all human beings have an innate desire to be happy and overcome suffering, just like myself. And, just like myself, they have the natural right to fulfill this fundamental aspiration.

Dalai Lama XIV

#46. To shut your mind, heart, imagination to the sufferings of others is to begin slowly but inexorably to die. It is to cease by inches from being human, to become in the end capable of nothing, generous or unselfish; or sometimes capable of anything, however terrible.

John Austin Baker

#47. Either the human being must suffer and struggle as the price of a more searching vision, or his gaze must be shallow and without intellectual revelation.

Thomas De Quincey

#48. Stupidity and wisdom meet in the same centre of sentiment and resolution, in the suffering of human accidents.

Michel De Montaigne

#49. More than any set of practices, factory farming is a mind-set: reduce production costs to the absolute minimum and systematically ignore or "externalize" such costs as environmental degradation, human disease, and animal suffering.

Jonathan Safran Foer

#50. The problem with loneliness is that, unlike other forms of human suffering, it teaches us nothing, leads us nowhere, and generally devalues us in our own eyes and the eyes of others.

Adam Bagdasarian

#51. Our only reliable source of strength is the goodness of our hearts. Our only foundation for coming to terms with the suffering of the times is our innate need to be decent human beings.

Sakyong Mipham

#52. The people I know who suffer from mental illness, sometimes they do connect you to what it is to be really human. There's a vulnerability there, there's something very potent.

Maya Forbes

#53. Be a human angel! With love, generosity and kindness, let us lighten the burden of suffering from humanity.

Debasish Mridha

#54. Yet who can say how our souls have been stamped by witnessing such a cruel drama? All souls are hostages to their human envelopes, but souls must decay and suffer at such indignity, don't you agree?

Gregory Maguire

#55. I tell you, we would be hard put to determine what is more evil
religion or the pure idea. The intervention of the supernatural or the elegant abstract solution! Both have bathed this earth in suffering; both have brought the human race literally and figuratively to its knees.

Anne Rice

#56. A lot of the roads, bridges, railways, and such are built through the use of forced labor, and that is causing the people great suffering. What we put into this in the form of human suffering is not worth what comes out of it.

Aung San Suu Kyi

#57. Is there anything more true than human pain? Is there anything more sincere than the cry for help from those who suffer? Only a great wave of mankind's pity can surmount an immense wave of human misery?

Ignacy Jan Paderewski

#58. I turned to human suffering because - this may sound odd - animal suffering is more difficult for me to deal with.

Rigoberto Gonzalez

#59. 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

#60. No perfect solution is, not merely in practice, but in principle, possible in human affairs, and any determined attempt to produce it is likely to lead to suffering, disillusionment and failure.

Isaiah Berlin

#61. To me, it is one world, and the non-human animals bear the brunt of oppression and suffering.

Ingrid Newkirk

#62. As Christian mystic Pierre Teilhard de Chardin once said: "We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience." He was right. If we recognize the soul lesson, we can grow beyond suffering, and there is no stress in this state of understanding.

Brian L. Weiss

#63. Tshe suffering of adversity does not degrade you but exalts you. Human tribulation teaches you; it does not destroy you. The more we are afflicted in this world, the greater is our assurance for the next. The more we sorrow in the present, ..the greater will be our joy in the future.

Isidore Of Seville

#64. Inhumanity is part of humanity as much as suffering is a part of stories. Cruelty is written in the human script.

Johnny Rich

#65. I take the view that anything you can do to relieve suffering or improve human health will usually be widely accepted by the public - that is to say, if cloning actually turned out to be solving some problems and was useful to people, I think it would be accepted.

John Gurdon

#66. You who feel no pain at the suffering of others It is not fitting for you to be called human.

Saadi

#67. People differ in where they direct their empathy and their compassion. Many people are intensely concerned about the suffering of non-human animals, and some do not care at all. There are cultural differences.

Paul Bloom

#68. In a world like this with no laws, no charter of human rights, it's the women who suffer. It's the women who learn what it is to be tough, not the men.

Alex Scarrow

#69. Sharpen your Claws against wrong doing, against human suffering. Have Ears like Owls, HEAR what your child isn't telling you. Have Eyes like a Hawk, so that you might SEE all that passes before you. Be Brave like a Bear and have the Courage of a Mother Lion to SAVE our young.

Theresa L. Flores

#70. Jesus suffered more than any other person in human history.

Billy Graham

#71. The sovereignty of God is the one impregnable rock to which the suffering human heart must cling. The circumstances surrounding our lives are no accident: they may be the work of evil, but that evil is held firmly within the mighty hand of our sovereign God. - Margaret Clarkson

Randy Alcorn

#72. There could conceivably be circumstances in which an experiment on an animal stands to reduce suffering so much that it would be permissible to carry it out even if it involved harm to the animal ... [even if] the animal were a human being.

Peter Singer

#73. Both glory and dominion last forever but glory is for God and dominion is for mankind.

Auliq Ice

#74. Suffering ... is not just lots of pain but pain amplified by distinctly human emotions such as regret, self-pity, shame, humiliation, and dread.

Michael Pollan

#75. 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

#76. If you look at any religious description of hell, it is the same as human society, the way we dream. Hell is a place of suffering, a place of fear, a place of war and violence, a place of judgment and no justice, a place of punishment that never ends.

Miguel Ruiz

#77. Hezbollah's contempt for human suffering is total, as it showed once again this morning when its rockets murdered two Israeli Arab children in Nazareth.

Tom Lantos

#78. It is human nature to seek revenge in the face of relentless suffering. You can't expect an unhealthy person to think logically.

Izzeldin Abuelaish

#79. I know all about human suffering, but I can't imagine a world without humor. It's one of the most important tools we have." I

Abby Fabiaschi

#80. Suffering must be the inevitable tariff exacted from spirit for residing in human form.

Mark Frost

#81. Afterwards, when it's all over, you meet God. What do you say to God?

Yann Martel

#82. Latin Americans hold on tight even to pain and suffering, preferring a certain present to an uncertain future. Some of this is only natural, entirely human. But for us, the fear is paralyzing; it generates not only anxiety but also paralysis.

Oscar Arias

#83. The most wonderful study of mankind is man. Relieving human suffering and diffusing universal knowledge is humanitarian.

Daniel D. Palmer

#84. It's not the suffering that wears you down and defeats you, it's the meaningless suffering. There's no limit to what human beings will put up with if they think it all has a purpose; there's no limit to what they'll sacrifice

William John Watkins

#85. I had to wonder what sadistic pleasure and entertainment human suffering must provide to the divine game players who decided the fate of their pawns in a board game they made of life.

Clyde DeSouza

#86. On the ward there was hurt and pain so big and so deep that speech could not express it. I had been interested in philosophy, and suddenly philosophy came alive for me, for here the basic questions of human existence were not abstractions: they were embodied in human suffering

Frank X. Barron

#87. Empty is the argument of the philosopher which does not relieve any human suffering.

Epicurus

#88. Even Avataras, saints, and sages have to undergo the ordeal of suffering, for they take upon themselves the burden of sins of omission and commission of ordinary human beings and thereby sacrifice themselves for the good of humanity.

Sarada Devi

#89. Fateful encounters with a cruel world reveal our character. No human is immune from heartbreaking loss. Regardless of our socioeconomic status, eventually everybody shall suffer a grievous personal loss, a body blow that inflicts pain of inexpressible magnitude.

Kilroy J. Oldster

#90. Might have been enough for a warning - it looked so like a human being dried up and distorted with age and suffering, with cares instead of loves, and things instead of thoughts.

George MacDonald

#91. Through every generation of the human race there has been a constant war, a war with fear. Those who have the courage to conquer it are made free and those who are conquered by it are made to suffer until they have the courage to defeat it, or death takes them.

Alexander The Great

#92. Stories always have held conflicts and contrasts, highs and lows, life and death situations. And there can be much suffering in stories, but now we say the artist doesn't have to suffer to show suffering. You just have to understand the human condition, understand the suffering.

David Lynch

#93. But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in mid-air by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in.

Virginia Woolf

#94. In relationships, when there is suffering there cannot be true love: true Love is Unconditional. Either Love is joy and happiness, or it is not Unconditional Love.

Human Angels

#95. Without Easter, Good Friday would have no meaning. Without Easter, there would be no hope that suffering and abandonment might be tolerable. But with Easter, a way out becomes visible for human sorrows, an absolute future: more than a hope, a divine expectation.

Hans Urs Von Balthasar

#96. An institution or reform movement that is not selfish, must originate in the recognition of some evil that is adding to the sum of human suffering, or diminishing the sum of happiness.

Clara Barton

#97. The new information technology, indifferent to human suffering, does not accommodate humane needs unless we harness it and make it do so.

Mahnaz Afkhami

#98. The suffering of human potential comes from the lack of a true pinnacle.

Fred Venturini

#99. In the Radiation Laboratory we count it a privilege to do everything we can to assist our medical colleagues in the application of these new tools to the problems of human suffering.

Ernest Lawrence

#100. Exalt yourself by devoting yourself to others, enrich yourself by making everyone's destiny your own, by enduring and understanding every facet of human suffering through your pity.

Stefan Zweig