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Quotes About Suffering

la pitié sentimentale n'est en réalité que « l'impatience du cÅ"ur de se débarrasser au plus vite de la pénible émotion qui vous étreint devant la souffrance d'autrui, qui n'est pas du tout la compassion, mais un mouvement instinctif de défense de l'âme contre la souffrance étrangère.
~ Matthieu Ricard
Can you give me one reason why I should go on living?" This book is a humble response to that question, for happiness is above all a love of life. To have lost all reason for living is to open up an abyss of suffering. As influential as external conditions may be, suffering, like well-being, is essentially an interior state. Understanding that is the key prerequisite to a life worth living.
~ Matthieu Ricard
Beauty is an answer to anguish...
~ Unknown
The pain of love is the pain of being alive. It is a perpetual wound.
~ Maureen Duffy
it seems to me suicide is its own kind of 'death in battle,' and it may stand in for all our sufferings... People commit suicide when they are at war with sadness, or fear, or loneliness, or pain. When a single blow seems preferable to daily assault. Suicide is not heroic, nor romantic, nor idealistic, but neither is it cowardly or sinful. Made in a fit of passion or very deliberately, it is a choice. [Édouard Manet]
~ Unknown
Hope--I keep saying the word, marveling at it. Modern and world-weary, we think we are beyond it. Too wise, too jaded, we think we are past such a thing. We know what the world is, what men do to other men, and to women, and what anyone may do to a child. We have seen horrors. Executioners in uniforms. Poverty. Illness. Then It come with its threadlike feet and delicate wings. It drinks our sweat and tears, and once again we believe things are possible. [Édouard Manet]
~ Unknown
One day you fall for this boy. And he touches you with his fingers. And he burns holes in your skin with his mouth. And it hurts when you look at him. And it hurts when you don't. And it feels like someone's cut you open with a jagged piece of glass.
~ Unknown
My sense of touch was floating six feet away from me; if anyone entered my room, I would cry out, but the knife was serenely cutting me up. Yes, I became a skeleton. At night my thinness would rise up before me to terrify me. As it came and went it insulted me, it tired me out; oh, I was certainly very tired.
~ Maurice Blanchot
The awareness at each moment of what is intolerable in the world (tortures, oppression, unhappiness, hunger, the camps) is not tolerable: it bends, sinks, and he who exposes himself to it sinks with it. The awareness is not awareness in general. All knowledge of what everywhere is intolerable will at once lead knowledge astray. We live thus between straying and a half-sleep. To know this is already enough to stray.
~ Maurice Blanchot
I feel myself dead – no; I feel myself, living, infinitely more dead than dead.
~ Maurice Blanchot
I am destined to illuminate you by burning myself up.
~ Maurice Blanchot
Chaque homme, parce qu'il croît un peu que le monde est né en même temps que lui, souffre, au moment de quitter la vie, de laisser l'univers inachevé. À plus forte raison un roi. (Le roi de fer, partie 3, ch. 9, p. 350)
~ Maurice Druon
All our knowledge merely helps us to die a more painful death than animals that know nothing.
~ Maurice Maeterlinck
All our knowledge merely helps us to die a more painful death than the animals that know nothing.
~ Maurice Maeterlinck
He is wise who at last sees in suffering only the light that it sheds on his soul; and whose eyes never rest on the shadow it casts upon those who have sent it towards him. And wiser still is the man to whom sorrow and joy not only bring increase of consciousness, but also the knowledge that something exists superior to consciousness even. To have reached this point is to reach the summit of inward life, whence at last we look down on the flames whose light has helped our ascent.
~ Maurice Maeterlinck
El dolor es inevitable, el sufrimiento es opcional.
~ Maurice Maeterlinck
Through the whole course of history, two distinct willpowers have been noticed that would seem to be the opposed, elemental manifestations of the spirit of our globe, the one seeking only evil, injustice, tyranny and suffering, while the other strives for liberty, the right, radiance and joy.
~ Maurice Maeterlinck
We suffer but little from suffering itself; but from the manner wherein we accept it overwhelming sorrow may spring. We are wrong in believing that it comes from without. For indeed we create it within us, out of our very substance.
~ Maurice Maeterlinck
Treasures have perished that were numbered among the noblest and dearest possessions of mankind; monuments have disappeared which nothing can replace; and the half of a nation, among all nations the most attached to its old simple habits, its humble homes, is at present wandering along the roads of Europe. Thousands of innocent people have been massacred; and of those who remain nearly all are doomed to poverty and hunger.
~ Maurice Maeterlinck
And indeed, if we had only the courage to listen to the simplest, the nearest, most pressing voice of our conscience, and be deaf to all else, it were doubtless our solitary duty to relieve the suffering about us to the greatest extent in our power.
~ Maurice Maeterlinck
She was born without reason … to die; and she dies without reason….
~ Maurice Maeterlinck
El dolor es el alimento esencial del amor; cualquier amor que no se haya nutrido de un poco de dolor puro, muere
~ Unknown
There is an atheism in Christianity, religion of God made man, where Christ dies, abandoned by God.
~ Maurice Merleau-Ponty
The work of the original Suffering Servant was declared finished on Calvary, but it is not complete until each of us has accepted the role of cross-bearing servants witnessing to the nations and bringing them to know Jesus as their offering for sin and Savior.
~ Unknown