Quotes About Suffering

In an African hospital, a pastor who had just witnessed another death was approached by a poor, elderly woman. "You know," she said, taking my [the pastor's] arm, "through many losses of family and friends and through much sorrow, the Lord has taught me one thing. Jesus Christ did not come to take away our pain and suffering, but to share in it."2

They say the Lord gives and the Lord takes away. I have never been given very much. What was there to take away?

There was probably so much blood being shed in different parts of the country that morning, the blood of militiamen at the hands of former victims, the blood of former victims at the hands of militiamen battling for their lives. Maybe the water could be a cleansing offering to the gods on behalf of all the dead, no matter what their political leaning had been.

Nineteen Thirty-Seven

Whenever there is someone in a family who has long been ill, and hopelessly ill," he wrote, "there come painful moments when all timidly, secretly, at the bottom of their hearts long for his death.

the police in the city really knew how to hold human beings trapped in cages, even women like Manman who was accused of having wings of flame.

Children will still die unjustly even in a perfect society. Even by his greatest effort, man can only propose to diminish, arithmetically, the sufferings of the world.

There is not love of life without despair about life.

You can't create experience, you undergo it.

Men are never convinced of your reasons, of your sincerity, of the seriousness of your sufferings, except by your death. So long as you are alive, your case is doubtful; you have a right only to their skepticism.

What is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying.

Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.

To abandon oneself to principles is really to die - and to die for an impossible love which is the contrary of love.

The modern mind is in complete disarray. Knowledge has stretched itself to the point where neither the world nor our intelligence can find any foot-hold. It is a fact that we are suffering from nihilism.

Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children. And if you dont help us, who else in the world can help us do this?

The absurd is born of the confrontation between the human call and the unreasonable silence of the world.

Ma souffrance est ma vengeance contre moi-même.

We all try to escape pain and death, while we seek what is pleasant.

The devil has put a penalty on all things we enjoy in life. Either we suffer in our health, or we suffer in our soul, or we get fat.

I believe we have inherited a world of suffering that must be transcended through the development of pointed direction, fostering an evolution to a higher level of consciousness.

We poke the fires of negativity with memories: past failures, past conflicts, past betrayals and humiliations. Constantly we rake the coals seeking to know the self in the light and heat of their pain. The last thing people will abandon, said Gurdjieff, is their suffering.

And, when some such suffering beast is seen, on his way to solitude, we humans prove our humanity by raising the idiotic bellow of "Mad dog!" and by chasing and torturing the victim. All this, despite proof that not one sick dog in a thousand, thus assailed, has any disease which is even remotely akin to rabies.

Then, slowly, very slowly, one of the two struggled from the unloving embrace and got, swaying and staggering and bleeding, to its feet. The other lay in a bloody torn huddle on the stony ground, its neck broken.

For animals that are overworked, underfed, and cruelly treated; for all wistful creatures in captivity that beat their wings against bars; for any that are hunted or lost or deserted or frightened or hungry; for all that must be put to death...and for those who deal with them we ask a heart of compassion and gentle hands and kindly words.