Top 100 Quotes About Suffering
#2. I cannot be a materialist - but Oh, how is it possible that a God who speaks to all hearts can let Belgravia go laughing to a vicious luxury, and Whitechapel cursing to a filthy debauchery - such suffering, such dreadful suffering - and shall the short years of Christ's mission atone for it all?
D.H. Lawrence
#3. Pain and suffering are two completely difference experiences. Pain is unavoidable. Suffering is self-created.
Noah Levine
#4. Why should anyone - the state, the medical profession, or anyone else - presume to tell someone else how much suffering they must endure as their life is ending?
Marcia Angell
#5. Consumers still buy products whose advertising promises them value for money, beauty, nutrition, relief from suffering, social status and so on.
David Ogilvy
#6. I am not worthy of my suffering. A great sentence. It suggests not only that suffering is the basis of the self, its sole indubitable ontological proof, but also that it is the one feeling most worthy of respect; the value of all values.
Milan Kundera
#7. The only medicine for suffering, crime, and all the other woes of mankind, is wisdom.
Thomas Henry Huxley
#8. Dying is easy. Anyone can throw themselves onto the pyre and rest a happy martyr. Enduring the suffering that comes with sacrifice is the real test.
Jay Kristoff
#9. So it is very helpful to begin to recognize this comparing mind, this conceit of "I'm better than" or "I'm worse than" someone else. When we do not see it clearly, it becomes the source of much suffering. It makes us feel separated and apart from others; we reinforce the contraction of self.
Joseph Goldstein
#10. Live fully present in this world with your heart attuned to God's heart, and you will be torn by the sight of so much suffering and ignorance.
Maria Grace Dateno
#11. Suffering happens when we expect life to be something more and different than what it is in the present moment. When we let go of all expectations, there is peace.
Kim Eng
#12. I don't care whether animals are capable of thinking; all I care about is that they are capable of suffering!
Jeremy Bentham
#13. Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional. - UNKNOWN I
Lori Deschene
#14. Be awesome! With kindness, serve the suffering humanity.
Debasish Mridha
#15. We think being a Christian means to go to church on Sunday and trying to be good through the week. Now I see it means suffering, being willing to let the hard things happen to you, so that God can use us to do His work on this earth!
Kimberly L. Smith
#16. It is widely assumed, contrary to fact, that theism necessarily involves the two assumptions which cannot be squared with the existence of so much suffering, and that therefore, per impossibile, they simply have to be squared with the existence of all this suffering, somehow.
Walter Kaufmann
#17. American culture has always known success, not suffering, so we've never known what to do with this part of the Bible. The more we succeed, the more we're seduced into thinking we can control everything. We dissect Revelation to get a sense of control over the future.
Bill Vaughan
#18. The time when freedom is no longer held in the highest regard is not during times of want or suffering, but during the era of civility, pleasure, and wealth.
Eric J. Martindale
#19. When a man can observe himself suffering and is able, later, to describe what he's gone through, it means he was born for literature.
Edouard Bourdet
#20. I believe often that death is good medical treatment because it can achieve what all the medical advances and technology cannot achieve today, and that is stop the suffering of the patient.
Christiaan Barnard
#21. It is part of His plan to send suffering to bring out a higher good; but surely it's also part of His plan that as much of the burden of suffering as can be should be lightened by those whom it is His pleasure to make happy and content in their own circumstances.
Elizabeth Gaskell
#22. We are not responsible for the world's suffering, only for our indifference.
Marty Rubin
#23. Animals, or at least those who are conscious and capable of suffering or enjoying their lives, are not things for us to use in whatever way we find convenient.
Peter Singer
#24. Suffering is intrinsic to human existence. There is no joy without its attendant pain.
Peter Ackroyd
#25. Suffering is a gift; in its hidden mercy
Rumi
#26. In the moment of hardship, we ask why some things happen. In those moments of suffering, questioning prayers that do not ask for explanations but beg the Lord to accompany us are the most useful
Pope Francis
#27. Whoever thinks from a distance about his situation lives it with suffering; whoever is close to it lives it with consolation, the fruit of a true wisdom.
Simone Troisi
#28. One promise of which we can be certain ... when we respond to trials with faith and trust, God will use our suffering for good, and it will point people to God and bring glory to Him.
Wendy Blight
#29. Reading the timeless stories strengthen my spirit in times of suffering.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#30. Suffering, it turns out, demands profound imagination. A new future has to be conjured up because the old future isn't there anymore.
Rob Bell
#31. Shakespeare is not writing Christian fantasy but Christian realism, and this entails martyrdom and suffering on the part of the innocent. This is the real world in which Shakespeare found himself.
William Shakespeare
#32. There is nothing special about your suffering.
Dan Davis
#33. From these prejudices there arises conflict, transient joys and suffering. But we are unconscious of this, unconscious that we are slaves to certain forms of tradition, to social and political environment, to false values.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
#34. The Bible teaches that we are to be patient in suffering. Tears become telescopes to heaven, bringing eternity a little closer.
Billy Graham
#35. The medicine for my suffering I had within me from the very beginning, but I did not take it. My ailment came from within myself, but I did not observe it until this moment. Now I see that I will never find the light unless, like the candle, I am my own fuel.
Bruce Lee
#36. As we free ourselves from the suffering of 'something is wrong with me, 'we trust and express the fullness of who we are.'
Tara Brach
#37. A very weighty argument is this namely, that neither does the light which descends from thence, chiefly upon the world , mix itself with anything, nor admit of dirtiness or pollution, but remains entirely, and in all things that are, free from defilement, admixture, and suffering.
Saint Augustine
#38. The call of the gospel is for the church to implement the victory of God in the world through suffering love.
N. T. Wright
#39. All our wanting comes from needs, thus we continiously suffer. The intellect teaches free will, free from suffering.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#40. Jesus didn't save you so you could cruise to heaven in a luxury liner. He wants you to be useful in His kingdom! The moment you got saved, He enrolled you in His school the school of suffering and affliction.
David Wilkerson
#41. There is no degree of human suffering which in and of itself is going to bring about change. Only organisation can change things.
Susan George
#42. It is that we are never so defenceless against suffering as when we love, never so helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object or its love.
Sigmund Freud
#43. Good yield does not come without suffering, it does not come without struggle, and toil, and yes, loss.
Geraldine Brooks
#44. What I remember as a child is that other kids didn't care about suffering. I always did.
Vivienne Westwood
#45. Take great pleasure and joy in the outcome of a time of suffering, trial, or persecution, realizing that we are enhancing our heavenly reward and understanding more about the power of suffering (Rev. 2:10).
John F. MacArthur Jr.
#46. Patriotism in America, as I understand it, is a matter of suffering, when the country fails to live up to its promises, or actively betrays them.
Greil Marcus
#47. There's no hierarchy in suffering. I think songs that are transcendent are the ones where everyone can feel something from it, you know?
Meshell Ndegeocello
#48. By saying "blessed are those who mourn", Jesus does not intend to declare an unfortunate and burdensome condition in life to be happy. Suffering is not a value in itself, but a reality that Jesus teaches us to live with the correct attitude.
Pope Francis
#49. To move through pain to wisdom, through fear to courage, through suffering to strength, requires resilience.
Eric Greitens
#50. Sometimes a man is intensely, even passionately, attached to suffering - that is a fact.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#51. There's nothing like suffering to remind us how not in control we actually are, how little power we ultimately have, and how much we ultimately need God.
Tullian Tchividjian
#52. No doubt you are right ... there would be far less suffering amongst mankind if men ... did not employ their imaginations so assiduously in recalling the memory of past sorrow, instead of bearing their present lot with equanimity.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#53. Suffering is not an elective; it is a core course in the University of Life.
Steven J. Lawson
#54. Don't say mourning. It's too psychoanalytic. I'm not mourning. I'm suffering.
Roland Barthes
#55. A true repentance shuns the evil itself, more than the external suffering or the shame.
William Shakespeare
#56. Half of the hospital beds in sub-Saharan Africa are filled with people suffering from what are generally known as water-related diseases.
Rose George
#57. All that a pacifist can undertake
but it is a very great deal
is to refuse to kill, injure or otherwise cause suffering to another human creature, and untiringly to order his life by the rule of love though others may be captured by hate.
Vera Brittain
#58. In the Christian faith, God really puts suffering front and center. He doesn't get squeamish about it.
Joni Eareckson Tada
#59. My own experience and development deepen every day my conviction that our moral progress may be measured by the degree in which we sympathize with individual suffering and individual joy.
George Eliot
#60. No matter who you are, the thought of so much suffering and degradation must cause you to shudder at the sight of a veil or cassock, those two shrouds of human invention.
Victor Hugo
#61. Mind precedes all phenomena, mind matters most, everything is mind-made. If with an impure mind, you speak or act, then suffering follows you as the cartwheel follows the foot of the draft animal. If with a pure mind, you speak or act, then happiness follows you as a shadow that never departs
Gautama Buddha
#62. Of course it's kitsch, and of course our love for every cult figure gets called kitsch when we want to separate the suffering it requires to create a symbol that lives in the world from the ravages of one's own life.
W. Scott Poole
#63. They sang that song which distills all the suffering and the hope of Africa; that song which had inspired and comforted so many, "Nkosi Sikeleli Afrika," God Bless Africa, give her life, watch over her children.
Alexander McCall Smith
#64. Though it may take much suffering to kill the able-bodied and effective members of society, it does not take much to reduce them to worn, listless, diseased creatures, who thenceforward crawl through life with moody hearts and pain-stricken bodies.
Elizabeth Gaskell
#65. When Job was prospering, he prayed. When he was suffering, he still prayed.
Timothy Keller
#66. Rejoicing in our joy, not suffering over our suffering, makes someone a friend.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#67. As Paul Tillich put it, suffering introduces you to yourself and reminds you that you are not the person you thought you were.
David Brooks
#68. It's nice to see how the suffering goes away in time. It always does
Kathrin Schmidt
#69. As for God, I frankly admit that I find it easier to live with the ageold questions about suffering than with many of the easy or pious explanations offered from time to time. Some of which seem to verge on blasphemy.
Rosamunde Pilcher
#70. The Lord confers great honor on his servants when he brings them suffering ...
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
#71. Suffering is universal, and yet nobody teaches us how to cope with this truth of life.
Lisa Danylchuk
#72. Because Jesus Christ suffered greatly, He understands our suffering. He understands our grief. We experience hard things so that we too may have increased compassion and understanding for others.
Joseph B. Wirthlin
#73. Look at the optimism of Nature. Nothing can stop it. Only the ego makes humans pessimistic, and this causes suffering.
Mata Amritanandamayi
#74. I do have the consolation that my enjoyment brings no death and suffering; when I die no one will jump up and down in joy; and I remember all the names and faces that matter to me." Mata
Ken Liu
#75. Do you hope you can expiate the crimes of the past by suffering in the present?
J.M. Coetzee
#76. Go out and serve the suffering. Learn to place others in front of yourself.
Mata Amritanandamayi
#77. Stress is a form of suffering. Look at your body and see what stress does to the body and its functions - what it does to the heart, the circulation, the immune system, the digestive function, the liver.
Eckhart Tolle
#78. From the bruised heel of Genesis (3:15) to the reigning lamb of Revelation (22:1), the Bible is a redemptive story of a crucified Messiah who will accomplish a royal victory through atoning suffering.
Jeremy R. Treat
#79. When so many lives are at risk, when so much killing is going on, when there's so much chaos and suffering, isn't the risk warranted? ... And if we don't take the risk of coming to the conference, what do we do? We let it continue?
Kofi Annan
#80. When we encounter suffering, it is important to respond w/ compassion rather than to question the politics of those we help.
Dalai Lama
#82. We are suffering from a glut of too many 3-D movies and not enough screens.
Henry Selick
#83. Like the ocean that remains calm in its depths even when waves rage over its surface, and like the sun that continues shining on high even during storms, we can at each moment create value and develop our state of life, enjoying our existence to the fullest in times of both suffering and joy.
Daisaku Ikeda
#84. Why am I begging you, who parades your suffering over the ruins like a king in order to ensure that you will never be touched deeply, you who're always laughing.
Kathy Acker
#85. If with an impure mind a person speaks or acts suffering follows him like the wheel that follows the foot of the ox.
Gautama Buddha
#86. His suffering was no more real than he was.
Johnny Rich
#87. We know that in some way, incomprehensible to us, his suffering satisfied the demands of justice, ransomed penitent souls from the pains and penalties of sin, and made mercy available to those who believe in his holy name.
Bruce R. McConkie
#88. No one can suffer for all time. No one will spend all his days on this earth in suffering. Every action brings its own result, and one gets one's opportunities accordingly.
Sarada Devi
#89. Suffering accepted and vanquished ... will give you a serenity which may well prove the most exquisite fruit of your life.
Desire-Joseph Mercier
#90. Millions of people are suffering: they want to be loved but they don't know how to love. And love cannot exist as a monologue; it is a dialogue, a very harmonious dialogue.
Osho
#91. There are two kinds of suffering. There is the suffering you run away from, which follows you everywhere. And there is the suffering you face directly, and so become free.
Ajahn Chah
#92. There was so much suffering in Africa that it was tempting just to shrug your shoulders and walk away. But you can't do that, she thought. You just can't.
Alexander McCall Smith
#93. Suffering makes us capable of the full force of the Master of Delight; it makes us capable also to bear the utter play of the Master of Power. Pain is the key that opens the gates of strength; it is the high-road that leads to the city of beatitude.
Sri Aurobindo
#94. When you know that somebody lost their loved one as a result of a decision that I made, that's a tough moment. If you're a faithful person you try to empathize with the suffering that that person is going through.
George W. Bush
#95. Pain and suffering
Is inevitable in this world
Yet we choose to survive.
I'm not scared of anyone anymore
And I can say
I've learned all I can from mice
Be a lion when you talk to me.
Monique Koll
#96. Everything in life that we really accept undergoes a change. So suffering must become Love. That is the mystery.
Katherine Mansfield
#97. because in spite of the most terrible suffering, the heart goes on loving; that is the beauty of love.
Santa Montefiore
#99. 128A Messenger has come to you from among yourselves. Your suffering distresses him: he is deeply concerned for you and full of kindness and mercy towards the believers.
Anonymous
#100. Nelson Mandela sat in a South African prison for 27 years. He was nonviolent. He negotiated his way out of jail. His honor and suffering of 27 years in a South African prison is really ultimately what brought about the freedom of South Africa. That is nonviolence.
Coretta Scott King
