Quotes About Suffering

Whatever pain achieves, it achieves in part through its unsharability, and it ensures this unsharability through its resistance to language. "English," writes Virginia Woolf, "which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear has no words for the shiver or the headache." … Physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it.

Physical pain always mimes death and the infliction of physical pain is always a mock execution.

The larger the prisoner's pain (the smaller the prisoner's world and therefore by comparison) the larger the torturer's world... pain becomes power... the torturer uses the prisoner's aliveness to crush the things that he lives for.

La desdicha, como el dolor físico, iguala los minutos. Los días se convierten en el mismo día, los actos en el mismo acto y las personas en un sólo personaje inútil.

Perra vida; sin trabajo, pronto nos va a secar el hambre!".

Como él, millares de inocentes en el mundo viajaban en coches oscuros, con los ojos vendados, tragando su propia sangre, hacia un destino inicuo. El destino de la víctima es siempre el mismo: ¡terrible!

Mental suffering occurs when a child is psychologically abused. If a parent calls a child names, constantly belittles the child, blocks every effort on the part of the child to accept him/herself, this can cause mental suffering to the child. Threat of abandonment can also make the child anxious and afraid, and is another form of mental suffering.

As abused children grow up, they may view themselves as bad, and everybody else as good, or, at least better. On the other hand, some abused children can see themselves as good, and others bad. They can become afraid of others and avoid them for fear of getting hurt. In its extreme form, these people can expect only pain and suffering from others, and see everyone as a potential attacker.

The trouble is, I am not at peace with myself; I am not always something, and if for once I am something, I pay for it by being nothing for months on end.' —Kafka, quoted by Canetti

Every command leaves behind a painful sting in the person who is forced to carry it out.

They are committing the greatest indignity human beings can inflict on one another: telling people who have suffered excruciating pain and loss that their pain and loss were illusions. (v)

Better that one heart be broken a thousand times in the retelling, he has decided, if it means that a thousand other hearts need not be broken at all.

Bread, soup - these were my whole life. I was a body. Perhaps less than that even: a starved stomach. The stomach alone was aware of the passage of time.

We were masters of nature, masters of the world. We had forgotten everything--death, fatigue, our natural needs. Stronger than cold or hunger, stronger than the shots and the desire to die, condemned and wandering, mere numbers, we were the only men on earth.

I have learned two lessons in my life: first, there are no sufficient literary, psychological, or historical answers to human tragedy, only moral ones. Second, just as despair can come to one another only from other human beings, hope, too, can be given to one only by other human beings.

The stars were only sparks of the fire which devoured us. Should that fire die out one day, there would be nothing left in the sky but dead stars, dead eyes.

Suffering pulls us farther away from other human beings. It builds a wall made of cries and contempt to separate us.

Listen to me, kid. Don't forget that you are in a concentration camp. In this place, it is every many for himself, and you cannot think of others. Not even you father. In this place, there is no such thing as father, brother, friend. Each of us lives and dies alone. Let me give you good advice: stop giving your ration of bread and soup to your old father. You cannot help him anymore. And you are hurting yourself. In fact, you should be getting his rations...

We are all brothers and we are all suffering the same fate. The same smoke floats over all our heads. Help one another. It is the only way to survive. (pg. 39)

And then I explained to him how naive we were, that the world did know and remained silent. And that is why I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.

This day I ceased to plead. I was no longer capable of lamentation. On the contrary, I felt very strong. I was the accuser, God the accused.

Never again becomes more than a slogan: It's a prayer, a promise, a vow. There will never again be hatred, people say. Never again jail and torture. Never again the suffering of innocent people, or the shooting of starving, frightened, terrified children. And never again the glorification of base, ugly, dark violence. It's a prayer.

A man can laugh while he suffers.

We must choose between the violence of adults and the smiles of children, between the ugliness of hate and the will to oppose it. Between inflicting suffering and humiliation on our fellow man and offering him the solidarity and hope he deserves. Or not.