Quotes About Suffering

I think that the Cold War was an exceptional and unnecessary piece of cruelty.

Seeing human suffering changes you. It either makes you compassionate or it makes you hard.

The few certainties in our existences are pain, death and bereavement.

You never saw them; you never met them; you were never touched by their suffering except on the evening news or at the occasional fundraiser. They were what they were because they were uncivilized, unteachable, underprivileged and unsalvageable. They were the underclasses, and you found a use for them, because without their cheap labor and their primitive wars, your own world of mirrored towers and imported luxuries and megabuck negotiations could never exist.

How vast was a human being's capacity for suffering. The only thing you could do was stand in awe of it. It wasn't a question of survival at all. It was the fullness of it, how much could you hold, how much could you care.

Quick, where is the Red Cross God with the ointment and plaster the needle and thread and the clean linen bandages to mummify our festering dreams?

I will put warm woolen socks on the feet of the people in the other world; but I dream and cannot wake, and I am cast over the cliff and hang there by two fingers that are danced and trampled on by the giant unreality.

I did not know my own identity. I was burgled of body and hung in the sky like a woman of straw.

So I, a migratory bird, am suffering from the need to return to the place I have come from before the season and sun are right for my return. Do I meet spring summer or winter? Here I live in a perpetual other season unable to read in the sky, the sun, the temperature, the signs for returning.

Why do you weep?" "The pain," I said, and it was true, but it was not of my wounds I spoke.

Estoy acosando a un hombre hasta la muerte, a un hombre que ha sido muchas veces bueno conmigo, el padre de mi hijo pequeño. Estoy destruyendo la felicidad de mi familia, ¿y por qué? Por el bien de la verdad, para liberarme de un engaño que estaba consumiéndome, matándome.

The truth of God's love is not that He allows bad things to happen, it's his promise that he will be there with us--when they do.

God loves you, that He plans for your good, not your hurt. "It's true that things happen in life that seem wrong and are painful, but it isn't because God likes to see us suffer. He wants to see us grow. He wants us to love Him, to trust Him.

How much suffering did you lay on yourself before you awakened and recognized that guilt is deadly, and empty, and profitless?

What is any war but a massacre?

To endure what is unendurable is true endurance.

You don't have to die heaven and hell are in this world too.

Love is like whoa! Actually, it's closer to woe.

I had accepted beatings, loneliness, and near-starvation as normal because those things had helped me to survive. Now when these women undressed me, it felt like they were removing a shield that had become a part of me. As they peeled off layer after layer, I began to feel my age and started crying. With my tears I shed each fiber of responsibility I had in caring for my sisters and brother. I was finally being cared for as a child, and so the child inside me opened wide.

Cognitively oriented therapists believe that we contribute to our own suffering by holding on to outdated beliefs and conclusions that keep us stuck in a particular story.

when he says that most of us find adversity unacceptable; we live in child's fantasy that everything should work out as we want it to. Like so many Buddhists before him, Fischer recognizes that suffering is universal. It happens to everybody. Yet embracing it offers us a key. "It is exactly in digesting the profundity of our difficulties that life opens up to us," Fischer says.6

Truly dreadful sounds ensue. The sounds of human disassembly.

If you're pitching your boss to let you work from home a few days a week, a common rebuff is how envious your coworkers would be if you were granted this special privilege. Why, it simply wouldn't be fair! We all need to be equally, miserably unproductive at the office and suffer in unity!

The bad thing about terrible misfortunes, the kind that tear us apart and appear to be unendurable, is that those who suffer them believe or almost demand that the world should end right there, and yet the world pays no heed and carries on regardless and even tugs at the sleeve of the person who suffered the misfortune, I mean, it won't just let them depart this world the way a disgruntled spectator might leave the theatre, unless the unfortunate person kills him or herself.