Quotes About Suffering

Do you see these wounds? These bruises?" "Yes." "They are my joy." "Pain is your joy?" "The pain in itself is not joy. It is simply pain. But the meaning of the pain, that is joy.

came at the impossible moment, and the world, which was powerful and sick unto death, burning and dying in its sins, was born again.

of becoming a desert dweller. Like Serafim, I had suffered on the cross with Christ, but unlike him, I had not yet given everything. You see, Aleksandr, in each heart three trees grow. Life cuts them down, trims them, crafts them into crosses. Then they are lifted high on a hill—a hill like a skull. One is the cross of Jesus, the second the cross of the repentant thief, and the third the cross of the unrepentant thief.

We grow angry at our suffering; we resent and complain and make others pay for our unhappiness.

To love mankind merely in the abstract", he once said, "is one face of a single coin, and on its other side is hatred of mankind in the abstract. To love in truth is to serve the suffering person before you, and to do what you can to assist him.

Perhaps there are places within us, places of true home, that do not yet exist and are carved from the stone of our hearts only by suffering. Perhaps. Who will tell me if this is true? For if it is not, then I am subject to the cruelest delusion of all. Yet, if I were to know, I would cease to be vulnerable, and I might make my home in exile.

For those who suffer disposal, the cost is their very lives. For those of us who survive, there is a creeping indifference to anything other than one's own survival, which results in increased selfishness, hardness of heart, denial—which in the long range will bring about the devaluation of self. To counter this devaluation, therefore, one flees into pride of accomplishment. Isn't what we do the defining measure of selfhood in our society?

Michael D. O'Brien

Oh, how beautiful is the heart of Jesus! How beautiful that he loves us in our foolishness, he who suffered so much for us. Now our poor world grows indifferent to what he gave, though not all. We still find many who are not blind.

Pawel withdrew into his own thoughts, reflecting on the fact that saints and mystics also spoke of suffering, darkness, and the agony of interior crosses. For a Christian, these were an indispensable part of the rising toward God.

He knew that in a sense he was a word, as Ruth had been a word to this woman by simply being herself. A word of presence—I am with you. I feel your suffering. I hear your cries beneath your smiling face and your statements so calculated to shock. I grieve with you, and I grieve in your place, as you will not allow yourself to grieve, because you think there is nothing beyond grief.

Was it not ordained that the Church must one day go through this second Passover?

I know I should be reassuring him that everything's all right, that he needn't worry, but I can't. Instead I'm talking to someone I don't know who isn't even there. Thank you, I'm saying. Thank you for Lucy, thank you for Claire and for Daniel, thank you for this cold and this blood and this pain. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

In the hopelessness of her situation she had found strength, and in her strength there was irresistible pain.

deep lines cut by trauma provide access to depths that are otherwise unreachable. In such instances, nourishment follows trauma to new places. We wish things could be otherwise … easier. But we have little choice when illumination shines through injury.

Where war goes on without end, all men are inevitably corrupted by its brutality -- and the worst horrors are visited upon the most innocent.

Hustling, the action, the performance, is embraced because it often provides the only relief from economic misery. The hustler is determined not to suffer silently and turns distress to opportunity.

The artist in Hansberry saw in the photograph of a black woman being manhandled by white cops all the suffering, all the injustice, all the offense to black life. The brutality was grave enough; the spread of the image transmitted trauma and reinforced the vulnerability of black women and, indeed, the race.

Love is an abyss. To somehow find it beautiful while it's killing you is what it means to be something other than an animated corpse.

Suffering is such a deep part of living," wrote Robert Kull, who lived alone on an island in Patagonia for a year, in 2001, "that if we try too hard to avoid it, we end up avoiding life entirely." The Tao Te Ching says that "happiness rests in misery.

Hope is the best form of torture

now the Spirit had come, and Mark's account of the baptism makes it abundantly clear that he sees Jesus as the Messianic Son and the Suffering Servant, equipped for his stupendous task with the Spirit of God promised for the end-time. The last days are no longer entirely in the future; in the person of Jesus the end has dawned.

Hospitals are terrible places to be and terrible places to die.

He hadn't been anything but tired and scared for six months and he'd lost a lot, mostly people, and seen far too much, but he was breathing in and breathing out, some kind of choice all by itself.