Quotes About Suffering

The girls had to kneel all night on the parade ground waiting to see one of their number punished

In the morning, the recaptured escapee had her arms and legs broken in front of their eyes.

Fold within fold, the beloved drowns in its own being. This world is drenched with that drowning.

Alone, alone, all, all alone, Alone on a wide wide sea! And never a saint took pity on My soul in agony.

Jealousy is not at all low, but it catches us humbled and bowed down, at first sight. For it is the only suffering that we endure without ever becoming used to it.

It is absurd to suppose that periods empty of love are blank pages in a woman's life. The truth is just the reverse. What remains to be said about a passionate love affair? It can be told in three lines. He loved me, I loved Him. His presence obliterated all other presences. We were happy. Then He stopped loving me and I suffered.

It has become clear to me during my workshops that a lot of the pain people carry is not their own and may go back several generations. Most frequently it is their parents' pain they have taken on, but it might also be their grandparents' or siblings'.

I don't know. On my last junket I was caught in the middle of a massacre. The one before that I was tortured and left for dead. Joy and recreation seem to have escaped me somehow.

Nevertheless, in this sea of human wretchedness and malice there bloomed at times compassion, as a pale flower blooms in a putrid marsh.

Sometimes I have thought that human misery goes far beyond human imagination,—imagination has its limits, and misery, like the vast seas, appears to be without end.

Amid the stillness of the night, in the depths of the ravine, from the direction in which the corpses lay suddenly resounded a kind of inhuman, frightful laughter in which quivered despair, and joy, and cruelty, and suffering, and pain, and sobbing, and derision; the heart-rending and spasmodic laughter of the insane or condemned.

Yearning hurts, and what release may come of it feels much like death.

S? r?mâi pentru totdeauna o omid? urât?, care se târ??te pe p?mânt, ve?nic înfometat?, nu este pl?cut. Dac? îns? omida consimte s? sufere o metamorfoz? profund?, ea poate deveni unul dintre cei mai frumo?i fluturi, liber s? c?l?toreasc? pe o pal? de vânt c?tre înaltul cerului.

You are to be pitied more than I, perhaps. I soar above all your innumerable miseries, partaking of the nature of the angels; for, as you have said, my place is not in your narrow sphere. You have the earth, I have boundless space. Enchained here below by the thousand bonds of your gross, material senses, your spirits cannot plunge into that limpid Ocean of the infinite, where, lost for a day upon your arid shores, my soul drinks deep.

If the essence of things is unknowable, the misery of man cannot be fathomed.

Niet dat ik per se wil sterven, maar het zou helpen om het leven draaglijker te maken.

But me they'll lash in hammock, drop me deep.Fathoms down, fathoms down, how I'll dream fast asleep.I feel it stealing now. Sentry, are you there?Just ease these darbies [manacles] at the wrist,And roll me over fair!I am sleepy, and the oozy weeds about me twist.

It comforted him because it could not be called suffering if it was a sign of Art.

The bomb that fell on Hiroshima fell on America too. It fell on no city, no munition plants, no docks. It erased no church, vaporized no public buildings, reduced no man to his atomic elements. But it fell, it fell.

Every age, every culture, every custom and tradition has its own character, its own weakness and its own strength, its beauties and cruelties; it accepts certain sufferings as matters of course, puts up patiently with certain evils. Human life is reduced to real suffering, to hell, only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap.

Often it is the most deserving people who cannot help loving those who destroy them.

You know quite well, deep within you, that there is only a single magic, a single power, a single salvation...and that is called loving. Well, then, love your suffering. Do not resist it, do not flee from it. It is your aversion that hurts, nothing else.

The punishment of desire is the agony of unfulfillment

Nothing more private than pain. It can only involve one. But who? Who is "I" in "I hurt"? The one who inflicts the pain or the one who suffers it? And does "hurt" refer to the inflicting or the suffering?