Quotes About Suffering

If you are the dealer Let me out of the game If you are the healer I'm broken and lame If thine is the glory Mine must be the shame You want it darker We kill the flame

Blessed are you who, among the numberless swept away in terror, permitted a few to suffer carefully.

The crumbs of love that you offer me They're the crumbs I've left behind Your pain is no credential here It's just the shadow, shadow of my wound

steer your way through the pain that is far more real than you

Now our Nile has turned to blood and in the cafes the scholars jest about a cosmic wound. Priests no longer smile at our catalogue of charities and even the beggars whom we pity and love refuse our coins with a curse.

I've got beautiful reviews for all my books, and I'm very well thought of in the tiny circles that know me, but I'm really starving.

What a pity it is that war, with its terrible suffering and devastation, should often be more vivid than peace. In war, your comrades mean everything to you, life is unsure and thus precious, and you know that the sword is raised above you. Now it is peace. Your friends still mean everything, life is still precious, and look--why didn't you notice it?--there's the sword, still raised above you.

When misery is the greatest, God is the closest,

To St. Paul, stripes, stones, shipwrecks, and thorns in the flesh were religious experiences to Judas Iscariot, the daily companionship of Jesus of Nazareth was not.

Prayer Against the Darkness Shekhina Pray for us now bound with scripture and shielded with shawl Armed with passion and loving care Pray for us now against suffering, turmoil, and injustice Pray for us now against the chaos of the dark.

was exceptional in suffering, which was often by the choice of others, but exceptional in prayer, too, which was by his own choice. If more were strong in prayer, more would be suited to suffer. Prayer develops bone as well as groan, sinew as well as saintliness, fortitude as well as fire.

If you aren't smelling awful smells sometimes, then you're not where Jesus is.

If you've never bled, you have no material for preaching. If when you're finished preaching you're not finished, spent, wiped out — if you haven't "given blood" — you haven't really preached.9

They say: 'Come to tea and let us comfort you.' But it's no good. One must be crucified on one's own private cross. I know that V. will not come across the garden from the lodge, & yet I look in that direction for her. I know that she is drowned & yet I listen for her to come in at the door. I know that it is the last page & yet I turn it over. There is no limit to one's stupidity & selfishness.

One must be crucified on one's own private cross.

The deeper the feeling, the greater the pain

Hell: a personalised service.

What worse can happen to a man than to have been born? It's like asking a man who is drowning whether he is not afraid of getting wet.

There is no beast more cruel than man.

When a man has the rope about his neck, you don't ask him about his health!

I cannot get accustomed to war; my brain refuses to understand and explain a thing that is senseless in its basis. Millions of people gather at one place and, giving their actions order and regularity, kill each other, and it hurts everybody equally, and all are unhappy -- what is it if not madness?

And he was tortured not by the fact that Death was visible, but that both Life and Death were visible at the same time.

Far from Italy, far from my native TarentumI lie; and this is the worst of it—worse than death.An exile's life is no life. But the Muses loved me.For my suffering they gave me a honeyed gift:My name survives me. Thanks to the sweet MusesLeonidas will echo throughout all time.

I unscrewed my own scrap of paper and read out: "Help! I am prisoner in the tower.