Quotes About Suffering

All human suffering is a variation on this theme—trying to control the waves, trying to control our present-moment experience so it conforms to our ideas and concepts of how it should be. If you want to suffer, compare this moment with your image of how it should be! I

In the end, the most enduring legacy of air-conditioning may be the divide it has created between the cool and the damned.

They were suffering from a diminished heart, a diminished soul.

In my life long study of human beings, I have found that no matter how hard they try, they have found no way yet to prevent the arrival of Monday morning. And they do try, of course, but Monday always comes, and all the drones have to scuttle back to their dreary workday lives of meaningless toin and suffering.

Expect to feel pleasure. Knowledge is sexy. Expect to feel pain. Knowledge is torture.

Wanting things to be different from what they are is suffering. Attraction and aversion, greed and hatred, lust and ill will: These are the attachments that cause suffering. "I like that; I want more"—"I dislike this; make it stop": Letting go of these attachments is the end of suffering. Release from this unsatisfactory predicament is the goal of life, whether we are aware of it or not.

I confess, without shame, that I am sick and tired of fighting—its glory is all moonshine; even success the most brilliant is over dead and mangled bodies, with the anguish and lamentations of distant families, appealing to me for sons, husbands and fathers….Tis only those who have never heard a shot, never heard the shriek and groans of the wounded or lacerated…that cry aloud for more blood, more vengeance, more desolation.

They kill you before you die...

Now, this is going to hurt just a little bit, sort of like having your flesh shredded with a cheese grater from the inside and then microwaved. But don't worry, it's not addictive.

I'd developed such an unbearably bad headache that I now had an escape plan. I'd simply wait to my head to explode, and then use the distraction to flee.

I won't say the pain was indescribable, since there are plenty of good descriptive words: excruciating, agonizing, unbearable, and so on.

I am going to make you hurt so badly you'll wish your mother had been skinned alive by your father before they had a chance to conceive you.

if we all learn anything from being alive on this planet, it's that people will lie to you, especially about how much or little they care about you. And I would guess there's a lot more similarity in how we suffer than the way we experience joy.

However much I disdained the notion of a drug-addled rock star, some part of me still believed that creation myth, that you have to suffer. And then I realized that everyone suffers. Therefore, anyone who creates art can, if they choose, focus on their suffering and say that's where it comes from.

Sometimes I feel as if we live in hell and don't even realize it. The lacerations are endless. The lies we accept, the rituals we perform. All these useless acts.

What is too much to bear? Not being alive is too much to bear.

Already his wings were burning up and he felt more like some ponderous moaning creature trapped in the mire.

Thus ended the Iran-Iraq War, one of the longest, bloodiest and costliest Third World armed conflicts in the 20th century. After eight years of bitter fighting, untold casualties, and immeasurable suffering and dislocation, the two combatants were forced, out of sheer exhaustion and debilitation, to settle for the status quo ante existing in September 1980. Yet there was little doubt that neither of them viewed the ceasefire as the end of the conflict.

At present, I am mainly observing the physical motion of mountains, water, trees and flowers. One is everywhere reminded of similar movements in the human body, of similar impulses of joy and suffering in plants...

Think what you like. There are people who die by remaining alive and others who gain life by dying.

You think I suffer, with all the people I have killed, the hundreds of lives I have destroyed. Should not demons visit me at night? Should I not be tormented by guilt? Sometimes I lie still in my be and wait for judgement, but it never arrives.

One learns a good deal in the school of suffering. I wonder what would have happened to me if I had had an easy life, and had not had the privilege of tasting the joys of jail and all it means. ~ Badsha Khan, quote in Nonviolent Soldier of Islam, p. 87

Whatever the times, suffering eventually touches every life. How we live with it, and help others to, is one of the great creative and ethical opportunities

to have great pain is to have certainty; to hear that another person has pain is to have doubt.