Quotes About The Suffering Of Others

#1. One does not remember one's own pain. It is the suffering of others that undoes us

Anna Funder

#2. Photographs that depict suffering shouldn't be beautiful, as captions shouldn't moralize.

Susan Sontag

#3. Once we are able to combine a feeling of empathy for others with a profound understanding of the suffering they experience, we become able to generate genuine compassion for them. We must work at this continually.

Dalai Lama XIV

#4. Suffering is tossed by handfuls over the multitudes, with most of it falling on some people and little or none of it on others.

Jose Luis Peixoto

#5. Nothing has inflicted more suffering on humanity than its dogmas. It is true that every dogma crumbles sooner or later, because reality will eventually disclose its falseness; however, unless the basic delusion of it is seen for what it is, it will be replaced by others.

Eckhart Tolle

#6. Perhaps there is no more dangerous place for a Christian to be than in safety and comfort, detached from the suffering of others.

Shane Claiborne

#7. 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

#8. True power does not amass through the pain and suffering of others.

Joy Harjo

#9. So if we love someone, we should train in being able to listen. By listening with calm and understanding, we can ease the suffering of another person.

Thich Nhat Hanh

#10. It is the story that we allow a Creator to write in our suffering that gives us the greatest opportunity to know the depths of His love, and in this way share that love with others.

Kayla Aimee

#11. Arriving at the scene of a suicide or domestic dispute made him feel a little less alien, as though seeing others in the throes of suffering dissipated his own distress.

Ania Ahlborn

#12. 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

#13. There is no such thing as good and bad in an absolute sense. There is only the good and bad- the harm in terms of happiness and suffering- that our thoughts and our actions do to ourselves and others.

Matthieu Ricard

#14. 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

#15. It is good to be attracted out of ourselves, to be forced to take a near view of the sufferings, the privations, the efforts, the difficulties of others.

Charlotte Bronte

#16. All suffering is caused by ignorance. People inflict pain on others in the selfish pursuit of their own happiness or satisfaction

Dalai Lama XIV

#17. Long-protracted suffering is apt to exhaust not only the invalid, but the compassion of others; violent emotions cannot be prolonged endlessly.

Stefan Zweig

#18. To conquer, you must endure not just your own suffering but the suffering of others. Indifference is the ultimate evolutionary achievement, the highest rung on nature's ladder.

Rick Yancey

#19. Patients weep when they discover they are their own victimizers and not the victim of others. They weep when they discover they are responsible for their own suffering.

Anais Nin

#20. May I hold myself in compassion.
May I meet the suffering and ignorance of others with compassion.

Gautama Buddha

#21. The counsel and care of others, while helpful and necessary, is not the ultimate solution. Jesus is the one who gives strength and contentment in the midst of suffering. Cling tightly to Jesus, who already has you in his invincible grip.

Stephen Altrogge

#22. To identify with others is to see something of yourself in them and to see something of them in yourself
even if the only thing you identify with is the desire to be free from suffering.

Melanie Joy

#23. If you are in the habit of creating suffering for yourself, then you are probably creating suffering for others too

Eckhart Tolle

#24. Even when our intentions are noble and our efforts sincere, even when we dedicate our lives to the service of others, the corrosive pressure of frantic over-activity can nonetheless cause suffering in ourselves and others. A "successful" life can become a violent enterprise.

Wayne Muller

#25. True kindness presupposes the faculty of imagining as one's own the suffering and joys of others.

Andre Gide

#26. When one takes action for others, one's own suffering is transformed into the energy that can keep one moving forward; a light of hope illuminating a new tomorrow for oneself and others is kindled.

Daisaku Ikeda

#27. Enlightenment, the great mysterious state of mind, is contentment, or freedom from suffering. How then do we measure happiness? We measure it in smiles, in the openness of our hearts, in generosity, in gratitude and compassion towards others, and in the steadiness of our contentment.

Andrew Furst

#28. You know that your happiness and suffering depend on the happiness and suffering of others. That insight helps you not to do wrong things that will bring suffering to yourself and to other people.

Thich Nhat Hanh

#29. My philosophy is that the most important aspect of any religion should be human kindness. And to try to ease the suffering of others. To try to bring light and love into the lives of mankind.

Steven Seagal

#30. The zombie is the angle. You want people to get to the rest of what you just said? Embrace the zombie. We live in a society of self-absorbed, unaware drones desensitized to the suffering of others.

Tami Hoag

#31. Scientists have made no clear effort to become an important, independently active force of mankind. Whole congresses at a time, they back away from the suffering of others; it is more comfortable to stay within the bounds of science.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#32. One suffers as a result of one's own actions. So, instead of blaming others for such sufferings, one should pray to the Lord and depending entirely on His grace, try to bear them patiently and with forbearance under all circumstances.

Sarada Devi

#33. The five rings of marriage: there's the engagement ring and the wedding ring, but there are three others, too: the boring, the suffering and the lawyering. I watched it for 20 years from behind a bar in Ft. Lauderdale. I prefer to stay single.

Steve Trotter

#34. The source of love is deep in us and we can help others realize a lot of happiness. One word, one action, one thought can reduce another person's suffering and bring that person joy.

Nhat Hanh

#35. Strengthen your heart muscles by removing the sufferings of others.

Amit Ray

#36. It is important not to allow ourselves to be put off by the magnitude of others' suffering. The misery of millions is not a cause for pity. Rather it is a cause for compassion.

Dalai Lama

#37. 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

#38. If we are in a position to affect the happiness or suffering of others, we have ethical responsibilities toward them2 - and many of these responsibilities are so grave as to become matters of civil and criminal law. Taking

Sam Harris

#39. Being involved with Oxfam has really opened my eyes to the world at large and the suffering of others. But my background and my life experience are what have allowed me to understand how interconnected we all are. I believe one person suffering reverberates throughout the world.

Joy Bryant

#40. The inner suffering of the evil you do to others is not fully understood until you are wearing their aches.

Darmie Orem

#41. He had used it as the epigram to his 1967 book 'To Seek a Newer World,' and it expressed two pillars of his faith: that everyone has a duty to alleviate suffering, and that no one can live a fully happy life while surrounded by the unaddressed misery of others.

Thurston Clarke

#42. It is always so, when we are unhappy we feel more strongly the unhappiness of others; our feeling is not shattered, but becomes concentrated ...

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#43. The more we think of others, the happier we are. The more we think of ourselves, the more suffering we feel.

Dalai Lama

#44. Vanity calculates but poorly on the vanity of others; what a virtue we should distil from frailty, what a world of pain we should save our brethren, if we would suffer our own weakness to be the measure of theirs.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

#45. I will never be ok with the suffering of others - that I will likely continue to fight so I must treat it as a marathon race not a sprint.

Kristin Bauer Van Straten

#46. If we stop thinking of ourselves and only of helping others, you will start to see a dramatic improvement in the suffering we are all going through.

Deepak Chopra

#47. I call him religious who understands the suffering of others.

Mahatma Gandhi

#48. For me, I am driven by two main philosophies: know more today about the world than I knew yesterday and lessen the suffering of others. You'd be surprised how far that gets you.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson

#49. The realization that we are all basically the same human beings who seek happiness and try to avoid suffering is very helpful in developing a sense of brotherhood and sisterhood; a warm feeling of love and compassion for others.

Dalai Lama

#50. To care only about your pain and suffering, and disregard the emotional toll of others is hypocritically sub-human.

Willie D

#51. I wanted to be able to live in the world so that I could live with myself. I wanted to do something practical to relieve the suffering of others, while at the same time striving to understand the circumstances of such suffering.

James Orbinski

#52. I hear the birds singing. Listen. I hear them in their cage. The others-all our kind who know of her-they think of her as heartless, but she wasn't heartless. She was only aware of things which I didn't learn till so many decades had passed. She knew secrets that only suffering can teach ...

Anne Rice

#53. War, famine, disease, genocide. Death, in a million different forms, often painful and protracted for the poor individual wretches involved. What god would so arrange the universe to predispose its creations to experience such suffering, or be the cause of it in others?

Ian M Banks

#54. Happy the heart to whom God has given enough strength and courage to suffer for Him, to find happiness in simplicity and the happiness of others.

Johann Kaspar Lavater

#55. When we are in constant pain, we cannot empathize with others, nor can we help them. It is only when we allow ourselves to open up to our own nourishment that we are free to feed the rest of the world. And thus, to attend to one's own suffering is the most selfless act.

Vironika Tugaleva

#56. What kind of world results if the power to dominate and control others, inflicting enormous suffering in the process, is sanctioned by a divine being who can at the same time redeem that suffering and release the perpetrators and their victims from that world's evils?

John Lamb Lash

#57. There's often a reason why people and dogs bite. It's about self-protection. If we respect what we may not know about the suffering of others and look at them compassionately, we open the door that can lead to understanding.

Jennifer Skiff

#58. Two things, generally, for me, is what life is about. And they're not funny. Living in the moment, is one. And No. 2 is getting out of yourself and helping other people. Because all of my suffering stems from thinking from myself.

Bobby Lee

#59. And there are so many people in the third world suffering so horribly right now, and we are so focused on ourselves and our culture that a lot of things are showing up in our culture that are making it impossible for us to focus on others. We're so self-focused.

Martin Sheen

#60. If we are to succeed, we must maintain our anonymity, mask our identities. Even if it means suffering the mockery of others. Being taken for fools, fops, nitwits, even cowards.

Emmuska Orczy

#61. I exhort you never to debase the moral currency or to lower the standard of rectitude, but to try others by the final maxim that governs your own lives, and to suffer no man and no cause to escape the undying penalty which history has the power to inflict on wrong.

Lord Acton

#62. Living to an extraordinary age, she mourned them all equally as she buried her husband and, one by one, her children. In this suffering she found the best sort of perfection
the kind that never demands it of others.

Martine Leavitt

#63. God creates us free, free to be selfish, but He adds a mechanism that will penetrate our selfishness and wake us up to the presence of others in this world, and that mechanism is called suffering.

William Nicholson

#64. If we have a very strong commitment, so that we can trust ourselves and be beacons of trust for others no matter what the circumstance, then we're protected from suffering the consequences of many actions. We can be protected from that pain.

Sharon Salzberg

#65. When the range and depth of the suffering of others and what we do to one another are no longer bothers us, nor moves us to remedy the situation and stop the pain, then we have lost a part of our own humanity, our own soul.

Megan McKenna

#66. Generosity is a lifestyle that seeks to understand the needs of others and strives to bring an end to that suffering.

Jeff Shinabarger

#67. In that moment, we knew that we were all weird, all in this together, and that addressing our own suffering, while learning not to inflict it on others, is part of the work we're all here to do. So is love, which comes in so many forms and can be directed at so many things.

Rebecca Solnit

#68. What is a holy person? The one who is aware of others' suffering.

Kabir

#69. Do not be a "go along, get along" person when it comes to the suffering of others. Integrity is not a popularity contest. Stand for love!

Bryant McGill

#70. I don't even suffer. My disdain for everything is so complete that I even disdain myself. The contempt I have for the sufferings of others I also have for my own. And so all my suffering is crushed under the foot of my disdain.

Fernando Pessoa

#71. As I crawled out of the abyss of combat and over the rail of the Sea Runner, I realized that compassion for the sufferings of others is a burden to those who have it. As Wilfred Owen's poem "Insensibility" puts it so well, those who feel most of others suffer most in war.

Eugene B. Sledge

#72. One of the most painful aspects of suffering is the loneliness of it. Others may offer support or empathy, but no one can walk the road to Moriah in our place.

John Ortberg

#73. A victim soul is a pious individual chosen to absorb the pain and suffering of others.

Laura Wiess

#74. Compassion allows us to accept everything. That's why there's always a tear in the eye of the Buddha that no one sees, for the pain and suffering of others.

Frederick Lenz

#75. Compassion can be roughly defined in terms of a state of mind that is nonviolent, nonharming, and nonaggressive. It is a mental attitude based on the wish for others to be free of their suffering and is associated with a sense of commitment, responsibility, and respect towards others.

Dalai Lama

#76. Indeed, we find that almost all the mental and emotional suffering which is such a feature of modern living - including the sense of hopelessness, of loneliness, and so on - lessens the moment we begin to engage in actions motivated by concern for others.

Dalai Lama XIV

#77. Don't Take Anything Personally Nothing others do is because of you. What others say and do is a projection of their own reality, their own dream. When you are immune to the opinions and actions of others, you won't be the victim of needless suffering.

Nikki Sixx

#78. I'm not sure God wants us to be happy. I think he wants us to love, and be loved. But we are like children, thinking our toys will make us happy and the whole world is our nursery. Something must drive us out of that nursery and into the lives of others, and that something is suffering.

C.S. Lewis

#79. Maybe God had needed her to suffer so she could understand the suffering of others and help them heal.

Paige Dearth

#80. Any man filled with empathy is capable of gaining valuable insights on the human condition through the suffering of others. You do not need to suffer to know suffering, but you need empathy first to identify and feel the suffering of others around you.

Suzy Kassem

#81. Learning to endure times of disappointment, suffering, and sorrow is part of our on-the-job training. These experiences, while often difficult to bear at the time, are precisely the kinds of experiences that stretch our understanding, build our character, and increase our compassion for others.

Joseph B. Wirthlin

#82. God points to the peaceful attitude of suffering people to teach others about Himself.

Joni Eareckson Tada

#83. The basis of Gandhi's nonviolence is to appeal to the good in others and evoke sympathy to one's cause through self-suffering.

Arun Gandhi

#84. Anyone who has gone through great suffering is bound to have a greater sympathy and understanding of the problems of mankind.

Eleanor Roosevelt

#85. Being a thoughtful vegan makes our time on this Earth more peaceful and joyous, because you get to have a hand in promoting and increasing the happiness, good health and well-being of others
both animal and human
rather than being an instrument of their suffering and death.

Russell Simmons

#86. Enmeshed in collective hatred and anger, each side proclaims the crimes of the other and its own righteousness, is unable to listen to the others suffering, and cannot look at the deeper roots of the conflict and how we often need our enemies in order to maintain our rigid identities. (p. 53)

Donald Rothberg

#87. The strongest people are not those who show strength in front of the world but those who fight and win battles that others do not know anything about.

Jonathan Harnisch

#88. The world exists on thousands of different levels and just because some are more tragic than others, it doesn't make them any more valid. You fall into that way of thinking and you become so overwhelmed by the world's suffering, you go mad.

Bella Pollen

#89. [D]on't cling to your self-righteous suffering, let it go ... Nothing is too good to be true, let yourself be forgiven. To the degree you insist that you must suffer, you insist on the suffering of others as well. (90)

Stephen Levine

#90. Therefore, let us put on a heart of compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, long-suffering; and let us prove our Christlikeness not only in our zeal for saving the lost but also in our relationships with others - forbearing and forgiving one another, even as the Lord forgave us. Let

Andrew Murray

#91. Compassion is not sympathy. Compassion is mercy. It is a commitment to take responsibility for the suffering of others.

Joan D. Chittister

#92. If you study your own struggles, the struggles of others, even in movies or novels you'll see the root of all their suffering is always attachments

Yasmin Mogahed

#93. Affliction equips the suffering to empathize with others in anguish and not only does it strengthen them, it enables them to be consoling comforters in a world full of hurt.

Donna Lynn Hope

#94. Why do men create suffering for others and fight over material wealth? Naked we come into the world, naked will go out of the world.

Lailah Gifty Akita

#95. People of delicate health, selfish dispositions, and coarse minds, can always bear the sufferings of others placidly.

Isabel Burton

#96. As a religious problem, the problem of suffering is, paradoxically, not how to avoid suffering but how to suffer, how to make of physical pain, personal loss, worldly defeat, or the helpless contemplation of others' agony something bearable, supportable- something as we say, sufferable.

Clifford Geertz

#97. Looking at various means of developing compassion, I think empathy is an important factor: the ability to appreciate others' suffering.

Dalai Lama

#98. Go out and serve the suffering. Learn to place others in front of yourself.

Mata Amritanandamayi

#99. 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

#100. Winning intoxicates you, and numbs you to the sufferings of others.

Margaret Atwood