Quotes About Suffering

The soldiers became desperate. 'We were absolutely, literally starved,' noted Private Joseph Martin in his diary. After four days without food, he gnawed a piece of black birch bark off a stick. Then, 'I saw several of the men roast their old shoes and eat them.

Epictetus's core claim: We are all hostages of fortune in some way or other.

I tell them I am not at peace in spite of what I suffered, but because of it.

Gustavo and Roberto suspected gangrene, but Rafael never allowed himself to sink into self-pity. Instead he kept his courage and humor, even as the poison flowed through his system and the flesh of his leg rotted before his eyes. "I am Rafael Echavarren!" he would shout every morning, "and I will not die here!" There was no surrender in Rafael, no matter how he suffered, and I felt stronger every time I heard him say those words.

Beautiful. All this suffering at the moment of destruction.

It is a terrible, wretched thing to love someone whom you know cannot love you. There are things that are more dreadful. There are many human pains more grievous. And yet it remains both terrible and wretched. Like so many things, it is insoluble.

Sometimes I think that God is punishing me. For what we did together. Sometimes I think that my life is a punishment for wanting. And the wanting is a punishment, too.

A volte penso che la mia vita sia una punizione per la mia inadeguatezza, e che l'inadeguatezza a sua volta sia una punizione. Ma penso: se Dio mi vuole punire, così sia. È un Suo diritto. Ma è mio diritto disobbedire

kurou, which could be translated to "suffering." But the English word seemed to skim the surface, whereas kurou went deeper. It referred to a guttural moaning, a piercing pain throughout your bones.

Worse things have been done than that. Yes, much worse. Yet perhaps the death of the very innocent always carries a curse.

That was the custom among Ashkenazim of Eastern Europe. Both bride and groom fasted and prayed on their wedding day. Among the Sephardim, it was the opposite. They plied the girl with sweets the whole day to give her pleasure and energy. But that practice made too much sense to the Ashkenazim, who found holiness in suffering.

The Noble Truth of Suffering, dukkha is this: 'Birth is suffering; aging is suffering; sickness is suffering; death is suffering; sorrow and lamentation, pain, grief, and despair are suffering; association with the unpleasant is suffering; dissociation from the pleasant is suffering; not to get what one wants is suffering--in brief, the five aggregates of attachment are suffering.' Samyutta Nikaya 56.11.

Suffering did different things to different people...Some souls became tempered, unshakable in their faith, while others became twisted and mis-shapen, throwing off all connection to God.

I once had a lover and his arms were so strong that my skull was crushed in his grip. With his bare hands he plunged between my ribs and took hold of my heart. A wafer between his fingers it dissolved. Sometimes I wake up in the dark and stand in the hall and I can feel the cold draft pass freely through my chest as though there were nothing there.

I've been in pain for a long time, honey. I'm just tired now. You fight and fight and fight and then… Oh my. There are days I just want to stop.

Why is everything always so hard?" "That's life, as far as I'm aware. Endlessly cruel.

It requires more courage to suffer than to die

Every day silence harvests its victims. Silence is a mortal illness.

Of course, we are drawn to teachers who unconsciously mirror our own psychology. None of us are clean. We all make mistakes. It's the repetition of those mistakes and the refusal to look at them that compound the suffering and assure their continuation.

The things that make you a functional citizen in society - manners, discretion, cordiality - don't necessarily make you a good writer. Writing needs raw truth, wants your suffering and darkness on the table, revels in a cutting mind that takes no prisoners...

At Maddox Table a yoke was carved for my neck, was tailor made.

But there is not room on the cross for two.

How terribly unfair that his whole self aches because of the shape of a shoulder, the soft line of a hip.

The Miss Lonelyhearts are the priests of twentieth-century America.