Quotes About Suffering

In a nutshell, the Buddha taught that life is suffering and that the primary cause of our suffering is our desire for things to be different from the way they actually are. One moment, things may be going our way, and in the next moment they're not. When we try to prolong pleasure or reject pain, we suffer.

At Gethsamane and Calvary we see him enduring our hell so that we might be set free to enter into his heaven.

Cycling is an excruciating sport - a rider's power is only as great as his capacity to endure pain - and it is often remarked that the best cyclists experience their physical agonies as a relief from private torments. The bike gives suffering a purpose.

I saw a group of museum staffers arriving for work. On their maroon blazers, several wore the lapel buttons that sold for a dollar each in the museum shop, inscribed with the slogans Remember and Never Again ... the victims of future exterminations could now die knowing that a shrine already existed in Washington where their suffering might be commemorated

Rouged green lips part like a gangrened wound.

I became educated to the fact that the greatest pain does not come zooming down from a distant planet, but from the depths of the heart. Of course, both could happen; your wife and child could leave you, and you could be sitting alone in your empty house with nothing to live for, and in addition the Martians could bore through the roof and get you.

Why is love so good...? You love someone and they leave. They come home one day and you say What's happening? and they say, I got a better offer someplace else, and there they go, out of your life forever, and after that until you're dead you're carrying around this huge hunk of love with no one to give it to. And if you do find someone to give it to, the same thing happens all over.

In a civil war… every side is wrong. It's hopeless to try to untangle it. Everyone is a victim.

What a tragic realm this is, he reflected. Those down here are prisoners, and the ultimate tragedy is that they don't know it; they think they are free because they have never been free, and do not understand what it means.

I can see Richard Wagner standing at the gates of heaven. You have to let me in, he says. I wrote Parsifal . It has to do with the Grail, Christ, suffering, pity and healing. Right? And they answer, Well, we read it and it makes no sense. SLAM .

Life which we can no longer distinguish; life carefully buried up to its forehead in the carcass of a dead world.

Life which we can no longer distinguish; life carefully buried up to its forehead in the carcass of a dead world. In every cinder of the universe Mercer probably perceives inconspicuous life. Now I know, he thought. And once having seen through Mercer's eyes, I probably will never stop.

Dr. Leon Stone turned out to be one of the most important people in Horselover Fat's life. To get to Stone, Fat had to nearly kill himself physically, matching his mental death. Is this what they mean about God's mysterious ways? How else could Fat have linked up with Leon Stone? Only some dismal act of the order of a suicide attempt, a truly lethal attempt, would have achieved it; Fat had to die, or nearly die, to be cured. Or nearly cured.

The first thing that went wrong, according to Fat, had to do with the radio. Listening to it one night- he had not been able to sleep for a long time- he heard the radio saying hideous words, sentences which it could not be saying. Beth, being asleep, missed that. So that could have been Fat's mind breaking down; by then his psyche was disintegrating at a terrible velocity. Mental illness is not funny.

O que ele não sabia na época era que às vezes uma reação adequada à realidade é enlouquecer. Ouvir Gloria pedir racionalmente para morrer era inalar o contágio. Era uma armadilha de dedos chinesa, na qual, quanto mais você puxa os dedos para sair, mais apertada a armadilha fica. - valis

There is nothing worse… no punishment greater than to have known God and no longer to know him.

the universe consisted of misery and hostility and would get you in the end. He looked at the universe the way most people regard an unpaid bill; eventually they will force payment.

to have watched a human being you loved deeply, that you had gotten real close to, held and slept with and kissed and worried about and befriended and most of all admired—to see that warm living person burn out from the inside, burn from the heart outward. Until it clicked and clacked like an insect, repeating one sentence again and again. A recording. A closed loop of tape.

The terrible dilemma of our lives. Whatever happens, it is evil beyond compare. Why struggle, then? Why choose? If all alternatives are the same...

Maybe it could be depression, like you get. I can understand now how you suffer when you're depressed; I always thought you liked it and I thought you could have snapped yourself out any time, if not alone, then by means of the mood organ. But when you get that depressed you don't care. Apathy, because you've lost a sense of worth.

Pris had now cut three legs from the spider, which crept about miserably on the kitchen table, seeking a way out, a path to freedom. It found none.

Death makes me mad. Human and animal suffering make me mad; whenever one of my cats dies I curse God and I mean it; I feel fury at him. I'd like to get him here where I could interrogate him, tell him that I think the world is screwed up, that man didn't sin and fall but was pushed -- which is bad enough -- but was then sold the lie that he is basically sinful, which I know he is not.

Mercer doesn't have to do anything alien to him. He suffers but at least he isn't required to violate his own identity.

El mal es un elemento consustanciado con el mundo, se dijo el señor Tagomi. Se derrama sobre nuestra cabeza, entra en nuestro cuerpo, nuestra mente, nuestro corazón, hasta en las piedras de la calle.