Quotes About Suffering

I do not like eating meat because I have seen lambs and pigs killed. I saw and felt their pain. They felt the approaching death. I could not bear it. I cried like a child. I ran up a hill and could not breathe. I felt that I was choking. I felt the death of the lamb.

In all liberation struggles it is the common people who bathe in the fire of oppression.

All human suffering springs from unbridled desire. Unless one extricates oneself from the clutch of greed, one will not free himself from the fetters of sorrow.

Oftentimes, the First Noble Truth is misquoted as "All life is suffering," but that is an inaccurate and misleading reflection of the Buddha's insight. He did not teach that life is constant misery, nor that you should expect to feel pain and unhappiness at all times. Rather, he proclaimed that suffering is an unavoidable reality of ordinary human existence that is to be known and responded to wisely.

It seems delightfully incongruous,' he wrote from Armentie'res, 'that there should be good shops and fine buildings and comfortable beds less than half an hour's walk from the trenches

There is still, I think, not enough recognition by teachers of the fact that the desire to think - which is fundamentally a moral problem - must be induced before the power is developed. Most people, whether men or women, wish above all else to be comfortable, and thought is a pre-eminently uncomfortable process; it brings to the individual far more suffering than happiness in a semi-civilised world which still

People talked so foolishly, I thought, about the ennobling effects of suffering. No doubt the philosophy that tells you your soul grows through grief and sorrow is right--ultimately. But I don't think this is the case at first. At first, pain beyond a certain point merely makes you lifeless, and apathetic to everything but itself.

To extend love, to promote thought, to lighten suffering, to combat indifference, to inspire activity. To know everything of something and something of everything.

Leave it to the Russians to have an angel gulag.

C'est bien la pire peines De ne savoir pourquoi Sans amour et sans haine Mon coeur a tant de peine !

Hell is empty. The demons are everywhere apparent.

What did your last slave die of?

So even in hell, there are clowns.

You are enjoying the gift of genius. When ordinary people are confronted with multiple tragedies, the pain scarcely increases. They simple can't feel the extra burdens. But you have a greater capacity for suffering.

I could never hurt him enough to make his betrayal stop hurting. And it hurts, in every part of my body.

Until we have the courage to recognize cruelty for what it is-whether its victim is human or animal-we cannot expect things to be much better in this world. We cannot have peace among men whose hearts delight in killing any living creature. By every act that glorifies or even tolerates such moronic delight in killing we set back the progress of humanity. -Rachel Carson (1907-1964)

James Howard Williams died during an emergency appendectomy. So accustomed to the burning ache of his ulcer, he mistook the new, sharper agony as more of the same. The man who never spoke of his woes stoically bore the pain of a burst appendix until it was too late.

people cause so much of their own suffering just because they think that without having these strong emotions they're not real people.

What I learnt from that was that the exhaustion that pain brings arises because we resist it. The thing is to learn to go with the pain, to ride it.

No one ever teaches us how to change from an angry to a non-angry person. No one ever tells us that anger causes 'you' suffering and is not helpful. That it stops 'your' peace of mind and everybody else's. It's never talked about in a practical way, only a moralistic way.

You love her without willing it or wanting it, and that is the most exquisite pain of all.'

What caused the gods to fall upon my family like starved lions in a Roman arena?

Military history reminds us that those who died on behalf of democratic freedom to stop totalitarian killing were a different sort than totalitarians who died fighting against it to perpetuate killing. The sacrifice of the former meant that generations yet born might have a greater likelihood of opportunity, security, and freedom; the latter fought for a cause that would have increased the suffering of future generations.

We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing the last of human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances - to choose one's own way.