Quotes About Suffering

The fifth kind of Zen, Saijojo Zen (Supreme Vehicle Zen), can also be called Nyorai Shojo Zen. Master Shumitsu said that it is training through which one has a sudden realization that one's mind is originally pure, that from the beginning there is no suffering which arises from our attachment to desire.

My teacher Bokuo Roshi, Abbot of Tenryu-ji at present, once said in reminiscence of his painful discipline in his bygone years, "The way to be liberated from suffering is to be quickly absorbed into it.

Some of you may practice zazen all alone at home with this book of mine as a guide. If you do, you must be well prepared for suffering. If there is no suffering, your sitting will be futile and you will find it difficult to continue zazen.

Hearing this, Master Eno scolded Shisei, "To calm the mind and contemplate is a Zen disease and not Zen. To what avail is it in principle to sit for a long time and suffer physical pain?

You cannot become a Buddha unless you kill the Buddha which is dualistically conceived as an object.

Literature can only imagine hell. For us, the rainy season was a living hell. The epic poets of Hindi have not even touched upon the terrible sufferings of the villages. What a monstrous truth that is.

How much can we ever know about the love and pain in another heart? How much can we hope to understand those who have suffered deeper anguish, greater deprivation, and more crushing disappointments than we ourselves have known?

A wound not fully felt consumes from the inside. We must run very hard if we want to stay one step ahead of this pain. Exhausted, we try to bury it with drugs, alcohol, overwork, television, physical activity. We are a very creative species—we can use just about anything to anesthetize ourselves. But in doing so, we also remove ourselves from feeling the joy.

Somewhere along the road many of us have picked up the belief that to change we must suffer. Some things are earned with work. But work is not suffering. Work is just work.

Have you ever thought that war is a madhouse and that everyone in the war is a patient?

Ogni responsabilità è della donna, ogni sofferenza, ogni insulto. Puttana, le dite se ha fatto l'amore con voi. La parola puttano non esiste nel dizionario: usarla è un errore di glottologia.

Io perfino nelle pause in cui piango suoi miei fallimenti, le mie delusioni, i miei strazi, concludo che soffrire sia da preferirsi al niente.

La Vita ha 4 sensi: Amare, soffrire, lottare e Vincere. Chi ama soffre. Chi soffre lotta. Chi lotta vince. Ama molto, soffri poco, lotta tanto, VINCI SEMPRE.

Però il rimpianto esiste, e i legami esistono, radicati in noi come alberi che non cedono neanche all'uragano, inevitabili come la fame e la sete. Non te ne puoi mai liberare, anche se ci provi con tutta la tua volontà, la tua logica. Magari credi di averli dimenticati e un giorno riaffiorano, irrimediabilmente, spietati, per metterti la corda al collo più di qualsiasi boia. E strozzarti.

La guerra è un infanticidio in massa, rinviato di vent'anni.

Sai la stessa paura che si prova all'inizio di un amore, quando l'intuito ci annuncia le sofferenze che esso ci costerà, e la prudenza ci induce a girarvi intorno senza accostarcisi troppo, ma è un girarvi a spirale, più vicino sempre più vicino, e sai bene che finirai per cadervi dentro: a pagare ogni istante di gioia con mille dolori.

Life is such an effort, Child. It's a war that is renewed each day, and its moments of joy are brief parentheses for which you pay a cruel price.

A lot of women ask themselves why they should bring a child into the world? So that it will be hungry, so that it will be cold, so that it will be betrayed and humiliated, so that it will be slaughtered by war or disease? They reject the hope that its hunger will be satisfied, its cold warmed, that loyalty and respect will accompany it through life, that it will be a devote a life to the effort to eliminate war and disease.

There is no sadder symbol of the crippling poverty in which millions of peasants were forced to live than the image of a peasant and his son struggling to drag a plough through the mud.

Justice could be cruel, and crueler yet necessity, but mercy was the cruelest thing of all.

War was never so careful as to inflict suffering only where it was merited.

We were all victims of an oppressive system, but that mattered far less to us than our deep bonding with our owners.

Life is full of grief, to exactly the degree we allow ourselves to love other people.

Christianity is the only religion whose God bears the scars of evil.