Quotes About Suffering

We may come singing 'Just As I Am,' but we will not stay by being our same old selves. The needs of the world are too great, the suffering and pain too extensive, the lures of the world too seductive for us to begin to change the world unless we are changed, unless conversion of life and morals becomes our pattern.

I did some Twelfth Step work down there once before. They put alcoholics right in with the crazy people. It's horrible—these men all twisted and shaking—eyes all foggy and full of pain. Some guy there with his fists clamped together, so he couldn't kill anyone. There was a young man, just a young man, had scratched his eyes out.

The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity, and independence bequeathed by your fathers is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought light and healing to you has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. .

where the Apostle John was first plunged, unhurt, into boiling oil, and thence remitted to his island-exile!

The prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers.

The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony.

If the generations of mankind suffered and laid down their lives; if martyrs sang in the fire... for no other end than that a race of creatures of such unexampled insipidity should succeed, and protract... their contented and inoffensive lives, why, at such a rate... better ring down the curtain before the last act of the play, so that a business that began so importantly may be saved from so singularly flat a winding up.

O God! What a misfortune to be born! Born like a mushroom, doubtless between an evening and a morning

It may be that no religious reconciliation with the absolute totality of things is possible. Some evils, indeed, are ministerial to higher forms of good; but it may be that there are forms of evil so extreme as to enter into no good system whatsoever…

He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain, which cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, until in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful graces of God.

Love comes in so many forms, and pain is no different.

He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain, which cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.

The suffering of his fellow Germans was not something to waste time sympathizing with, but rather to transform, cold-bloodedly and immediately, into political support for his own ambitions.

The people were there, and the land—the first dazed and bleeding and hungry, and, when winter came, shivering in their rags in the hovels which the bombings had made of their homes; the second a vast wasteland of rubble. The German people had not been destroyed, as Hitler, who had tried to destroy so many other peoples and, in the end, when the war was lost, themselves, had wished.

Like a man who has been dying for many days, a man in your city is numb to the stench.

There is something in the Russia-ness of Russia that often seems to intoxicate. Again and again, discussions of the country's history, particularly those of non-Russians but sometimes those of Russians themselves, veer into romanticised essentialism, evocations of some supposed irreducible, ineffable Russian Spirit, with a black box at its heart. Not only uniquely sad but uniquely inscrutable, evasive of explanation: mnogostradalnaya, much-suffering Russia; Little Mother Russia.

A haggard man used one of the huts as a home. He lay on a sagging mattress, his head on his pack, surrounded by rubbish - paper, porcelain shards, food remains and unidentifiable debris. His hand was over his eyes. He looked like a failed soldier. Dirt seemed so worked into him that the lines of his face were like writing.

Ilse Aichinger, "The Bound Man

I didn't tell the story to ask for help because I knew there was no help.

To be damned by the devil is to be truly blessed.

Là dove il popolo partiva per la guerra, restavano sentieri amari… E tutto quell'universo di terrestre bellezza e di angosce, Danijar l'apriva davanti a me nel suo canto. Dove aveva imparato, da chi aveva avuto tutto ciò? Capivo che così può amare la sua terra solo chi per lunghi anni ha languito per essa, chi ha patito di questo amore. Quando la cantava, vedevo proprio lui, un povero ragazzetto, vagabondare per le strade della steppa.

YOGA becomes the destroyer of pain for

As a rule I don't like suffering to no purpose. Suffering should be creative, should give birth to something good and lovely.

When suffering knocks at your door and you say there is no seat for him, he tells you not to worry because he has brought his own stool.