Quotes About Suffering

So why do we bother with love? No matter how much we love someone we are never going to make them, or ourselves, free of pain.

So heaven is life with the good bits taken out, and with an all-white backdrop.

Nora had also felt that simply to be in his presence was to commit some kind of invisible crime. Ever since the ligament injury that thwarted his rugby career, he'd had a sincere conviction that the universe was against him. And Nora was, at least she felt, considered by him as part of that same universal plan. From that moment in that car park she had felt she was really just an extension of the pain in his left knee. A walking wound.

Because I am clearly destined to be unhappy in other lives too. That is just me. I add nothing. I am wallowing in self-pity. I want to die.

Some humans not only liked violence but craved it, I realized. Not because they wanted pain, but because they already had pain and wanted to be distracted

To Live Is to Suffer

Pain, of any kind, is a very isolating experience.

Mum said Oh God oh please God oh God oh please please oh God and God said nothing.

If we demand the future be free from suffering in order to be happy, we can't be happy. It is like demanding the sea be entirely still before we sail on it.

No. It's about everything. It seems impossible to live without hurting people.' 'That's because it is.

Some humans not only liked violence but craved it, I realized. Not because they wanted pain, but because they already had pain and wanted to be distracted from that kind of pain with a lesser kind.

No. It's about everything. It seems impossible to live without hurting people.' 'That's because it is.' 'So why live at all?

I wanted to be dead. No. That's not quite right. I didn't want to be dead, I just didn't want to be alive. Death was something that scared me. And death only happens to people who have been living. There were infinitely more people who had never been alive. I wanted to be one of those people. That old classic wish. To never have been born. To have been one of the three hundred million sperm that hadn't made it.

Sembra impossibile vivere senza ferire le persone». «Perché è così». «E allora perché vivere?». «Beh, a essere sinceri, anche morire fa soffrire le altre persone. Dunque, quale vita vorresti scegliere adesso?».

Basically it says that the world is what we recognize in our own will. Humans are ruled by their basic desires and this leads to suffering and pain, because our desires make us crave things from the world but the world is nothing but representation. Because those same cravings shape what we see. We end up feeding from ourselves, until we go mad. And end up in here.

Albert Camus said, "There is no love of life without despair of life.

It's dull. It's the dullest life you can imagine. Here, you have pain, and loss, that's the price. But the rewards can be wonderful, Gulliver.

This is everything I wanted, so why am I not happy? So what was Schopenhauer's answer? Well, if wanting things was the problem, the answer had to be in giving things up. In his language, the cause of suffering is intensity of will.

So, I thought to myself as I walked away, this is what happens when you live on Earth. You crack. You hold reality in your hands until it burns and then you have to drop the plate.

Chi teme di soffrire, soffre già perché teme.

As Montaigne put it, "He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears.

I read news websites—another distraction—and my mind couldn't take it. The knowledge of so much suffering in the world didn't help put my pain in perspective. It just made me feel powerless. And pathetic that my invisible woes were so paralyzing when there were so many visible woes in the world. My despair intensified. So I decided to do something. I disconnected.

because for pain to be felt there must be a living presence – a me – to feel it.

As well as religion, human history is full of depressing things like colonization, disease, racism, sexism, homophobia, class snobbery, environmental destruction, slavery, totalitarianism, military dictatorships, inventions of things which they had no idea how to handle (the atomic bomb, the Internet, the semicolon), the victimization of clever people, the worshipping of idiotic people, boredom, despair, periodic collapses, and catastrophes within the psychic landscape.