Quotes About Suffering

She gave Mother Beal a look I couldn't, at that age, interpret but I have since come to think of as profound maternal compassion, a strength emanating from a deep well of endurance that, across my life, I've come understand was not particular to Sarah Schofield. I've witnessed it in other women who have suffered much without losing their hope or their gift for embracing with forgiveness those who are broken.

Even this man who is unknown to us was known to God and God was his constant companion. God never promised us an easy life. He never promised that we wouldn't suffer, that we wouldn't feel despair and loneliness and confusion and desperation. What he did promise was that in our suffering we would never be alone.

God never promised us an easy life. He never promised that we wouldn't suffer, that we wouldn't feel despair and loneliness and confusion and desperation. What he did promise was that in our suffering we would never be alone. And though we may sometimes make ourselves blind and deaf to his presence he is beside us and around us and within us always. We are never separated from his love. And

the most important promise of all. That there would be surcease. That there would be an end to our pain and our suffering and our loneliness, that we would be with him and know him, and this would be heaven. This man, who in life may have felt utterly alone, feels alone no more. This man, whose life may have been days and nights of endless waiting, is waiting no more. He is where God always knew he would be, in a place prepared. And for this we rejoice.

1) There exist instances of intense suffering which an omnipotent, omniscient being could have prevented without thereby losing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse. 2) An omniscient, wholly good being would prevent the occurrence of any intense suffering it could, unless it could not do so without thereby losing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse. 3) (Therefore) There does not exist an omnipotent, omniscient, wholly good being.

It was as if there was a place called After, and if I could just push my family across to that shore, then everything would be all right. There would be time for all these "soft" problems in the land of After.

there are wounds worse than fatal, which the law's little binary distinctions—guilty/innocent, criminal/victim—cannot fathom, let alone fix. The law is a hammer, not a scalpel.

If the atheist believes that suffering is bad or ought not to be, then he's making moral judgments that are possible only if God exists.

Paradoxically, then, even though the problem of suffering is the greatest objection to the existence of God, at the end of the day God is the only solution to the problem of suffering. If God does not exist, then we are locked without hope in a world filled with pointless and unredeemed suffering

One rabbi who survived the camp summed it up well when he said that at Auschwitz it was as though there existed a world in which all the Ten Commandments were reversed. Mankind had never seen such a hell.

Christianity entails doctrines that increase the probability of the coexistence of God and suffering.

The craving became almost unbearable, and he felt his heart break with the wanting.

Hell is paved with good Samaritans.

This is a lovely world, he sighed. And yet it has suffered horror. Sometimes, so-called civilization seems bent on destroying those very things which it is sworn to protect.

It was silly to suppose that trials only hardened men, automatically making them wise. He knew many who were stupid, arrogant, and mean, in spite of having suffered.

Todo lo que este mundo le dio a nuestro Señor fue una cruz y una tumba. Ofrecer

You love something that ain't there and then you start hating what is there, and that's hell.

Samuel Johnson: "He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.

it smelled like jail...sore knees and loose assholes.

Morris had been raised a Mennonite stoic in a tribe that wasn't a tribe at all, but more a failed cult whose main sources of entertainment were music, wordplay, and suffering.

At these moments sufferers desperately want to escape from their holes, the silence and loneliness, and return to the world we share with others… At these moments, language, the means of expression we are most comfortable with, becomes truly therapeutic – a form of medicine that has the power to relieve our suffering

That is what the Slave Trade was all about. Not death from poxes and musketry and whippings and malnutrition and melancholy and suicide: death itself. For before the white men came to Guinea to strip-mine field hands. ... black people did not die ... the decedent ... took up residence in an afterworld that was in many ways indistinguishable from his former estate.

It is good for me to be afflicted that I may die wholly to this world and all that is in it.

The truth is that God is to be found in all things--even and most especially in the painful, tragic and unpleasant things.