Quotes About Suffering

As long as he fought imaginary giants, Don Quixote was just play-acting. However once he actually kills someone, he will cling to his fantasies for all he is worth, because only they give meaning to his tragic misdeed. Paradoxically, the more sacrifices we make for an imaginary story, the more tenaciously we hold on to it, because we desperately want to give meaning to those sacrifices and to the suffering we have caused.

The big question facing humans isn't "what is the meaning of life?" but rather "how do we stop suffering?

This is the deep reason secular people cherish scientific truth: not in order to satisfy their curiosity, but in order to know how best to reduce the suffering in the world.

Whenever politicians start talking in mystical terms, beware. They might be trying to disguise and excuse real suffering by wrapping it up in big, incomprehensible words.

We cannot search for the truth and for the way out of suffering without the freedom to think, investigate, and experiment

Morality doesn't mean "following divine commands." It means "reducing suffering." Therefore in order to act morally, you don't need to believe in any myth or story.

Most history books focus on the ideas of great thinkers, the bravery of warriors, the charity of saints and the creativity of artists. They have much to tell about the weaving and unravelling of social structures, about the rise and fall of empires, about the discovery and spread of technologies. Yet they say nothing about how all this influenced the happiness and suffering of individuals. This is the biggest lacuna in our understanding of history. We had better start filling it.

How do you know if an entity is real? Very simple – just ask yourself, 'Can it suffer?

Generation für Generation beteten die Menschen zu jedem Gott, jedem Engel, jedem Heiligen, und sie erfanden unzählige Instrumente, Institutionen und Gesellschaftssysteme – trotzdem starben sie weiter millionenfach an Hunger, Epidemien und Gewalt. Viele Denker und Propheten kamen zu dem Schluss, Hunger, Krankheit und Krieg seien eben fester Bestandteil von Gottes kosmischem Plan oder unserer unvollkommenen Natur, und erst am Ende aller Zeit würden wir davon befreit werden.

Gautama found that there was a way to exit this vicious circle. If, when the mind experiences something pleasant or unpleasant, it simply understand things as they are, then there is no suffering. If you experience sadness but you do not suffer from it. There can actually be richness in the sadness. If you experience joy without craving that the joy linger and intensify, you continue to feel joy without losing your peace of mind.

suffering arises from craving; the only way to be fully liberated from suffering is to be fully liberated from craving; and the only way to be liberated from craving is to train the mind to experience reality as it is. This

We might actually get the worst of both worlds, suffering simultaneously from high unemployment and a shortage of skilled labor.

humans suffer from insufficient data, from faulty programming (genetic and cultural), from muddled definitions, and from the chaos of life.

Since there is no script, and since humans fulfil no role in any great drama, terrible things might befall us and no power will come to save us or give meaning to our suffering. There won't be a happy ending, or a bad ending, or any ending at all. Things just happen, one after the other. The modern world does not believe in purpose, only in cause. If modernity has a motto, it is 'shit happens'.

In the end he came to the realisation that suffering is not caused by ill fortune, by social injustice, or by divine whims. Rather, suffering is caused by the behaviour patterns of one's own mind.

we should be careful not to make real people suffer for the sake of a fiction.

Can a nation really suffer? Has a nation eyes, hands, senses, affections and passions? If you prick it, can it bleed? Obviously not. If it is defeated in war, loses a province, or even forfeits its independence, still it cannot experience pain, sadness or any other kind of misery, for it has no body, no mind, and no feelings whatsoever. In truth, it is just a metaphor.

Rather, he led them against the Manchu Qing dynasty in the Taiping Rebellion – the deadliest war of the nineteenth century. From 1850 to 1864, at least 20 million people lost their lives; far more than in the Napoleonic Wars or in the American Civil War.

the only way to be fully liberated from suffering is to be fully liberated from craving; and the only way to be liberated from craving is to train the mind to experience reality as it is.

Secular ethics relies not on obeying the edicts of this or that god, but rather on a deep appreciation of suffering.

Yet in the case of animals such as cattle, sheep and Sapiens, each with a complex world of sensations and emotions, we have to consider how evolutionary success translates into individual experience. In the following chapters we will see time and again how a dramatic increase in the collective power and ostensible success of our species went hand in hand with much individual suffering.

Unfortunately, the evolutionary perspective is an incomplete measure of success. It judges everything by the criteria of survival and reproduction, with no regard for individual suffering and happiness.

all power is concentrated in the hands of a tiny elite while most people suffer not from exploitation but from something far worse—irrelevance.

La domesticación de los animales se basaba en una serie de prácticas brutales que con el paso de los siglos se hicieron todavía más crueles.