Quotes About Suffering

Suffering and loss have this extraordinary capacity to alert and awaken us to the gift that life is.

When we hear people saying they can't believe in a God who gets angry—yes, they can. How should God react to a child being forced into prostitution? How should God feel about a country starving while warlords hoard the food supply? What kind of God wouldn't get angry at a financial scheme that robs thousands of people of their life savings?

Sometimes lightning struck twice; sometimes, one person got more than their share of suffering.

NO RADIO; no movies; limited reading—little diversion between the hard day just past and the hard day just ahead. "Living was just drudgery then," says Carroll Smith of Blanco. "Living—just living—was a problem. No lights. No plumbing. Nothing. Just living on the edge of starvation. That was farm life for us. God, city people think there was something fine about it. If they only knew Ã¢â'¬Â¦

Time would never cure it. Almost half a century later, when she was the only one of the nine Kennedy siblings still living, the author would ask Jean Kennedy Smith about her brother Bobby and his depression over Jack's death. "When did he come out of that?" she repeated, and then said, "I don't think he ever came out of that.

As one 1935 study put it, boys and girls who were 15 or 16 in 1929 when the Depression began are no longer children; they are grown-ups – adults who had never, since they left school, had anything productive to do; adults in the embittered by years of suffering and hardship. The President's Advisory Commission on Education was to warn of a whole lost generation of young people.

There is no such thing as a humane war.

the unkindest thing you can do for a hungry man is to give him food.

he tripped over her and went down. And I stomped him. With my bare feet I stomped him, landing on that lobster-horror head with both feet. His head crunched. It felt awful. It was like jumping on a strawberry box. It splintered and crunched and went to pieces. I cringed at the feel, even though I was in an agony to fight, to kill. I trampled worms and hopped away, feeling sick.

All psychological suffering (or happiness, taken in its usual sense) is a matter of comparison.

Strangely, the best can come from this neglected quarter. We will go to almost any length to avoid this painful paradox; but in that refusal we only confine ourselves to the useless experience of contradiction. Contradiction brings the crushing burden of meaninglessness. One can endure any suffering if it has meaning; but meaninglessness is unbearable. Contradiction is barren and destructive, yet paradox is creative. It is a powerful embracing of reality.

When one has grown strong and wise enough, the warring elements which cost so much suffering and anxiety, will become complementary elements and produce the great work of art which is your own life.

this surely is the worst deprivation of all: to be barred from the essence of beauty and holiness when just those qualities are right in front of you is the cruelest of all suffering

On the other hand, he was compassionate because he knew pain, real pain, and real suffering too. Yet even in those bouts when it looked for sure as if he would die, he was never given morphine, not even as his screams of pain rattled the palace windows. That poor child had traveled to the bottom of life and back again, and naturally that had had a profound effect on him.

Although we suffer horribly still there is peace in our souls

People must have bread! People will grow angry without bread!

How the Feds ever acquired the power to decide how much pain a sick person must suffer before dying remains legally obscure. The Constitution certainly never granted such sadistic power to any part of the government.

Some lucky souls jump to Circuit V bliss without passing through the horrors of "chemicalization" and the "Dark Night of the Soul.

Murder was a terrible thing. Even if you're not quite right in the head, you can realize that much. Mother must be suffering quite a bit. Perhaps

A bitter heart that bides its time and bites.

And man, whose heav'n-erected face The smiles of love adorn Man's inhumanity to man Makes countless thousands mourn!

Riches do not so much exhilarate us with their possession, as they torment us with their loss.

God never does nothing wrong [...]. He's always loving, fair, honest'n pure, like the preachers say. He knows everthing and He's more powerful than anything else or anybody who's ever lived nor never's gonna live. I believe that. I got to. But sometimes, when things happen, it's all so hard to take in. Our brains is just too puny. And the question is"—she's sobbing now—"why didn't He make them bigger?

For the longest time, Mimi Warren did not move, then she looked at me and said, "I don't feel anything." I said, "Kid, you've had so much done to you that the part that feels went dead a long time ago." Maybe Carol Hillegas could fix it. Mimi cocked her head the way a bird will, as if I'd said something curious, and smiled. "Is that what you think?