Quotes About Suffering

She wants neither land nor a house. She'll die if she can't see you.

The religion that only comes to us from external scriptures never becomes our own; our only tie with it is that of habit. To gain religion within is man's great lifelong adventure. In the extremity of suffering must it be born; on his life-blood it must live; and then, whether or not it brings him happiness, the man's journey shall end in the joy of fulfilment.

As human beings, we tend to describe our vast universe and complicated emotions by comparing them to things we already know and comprehend. And many of us suffer by comparison.

Suffering had always appeared to me as an opportunity, I said, and I wasn't sure I would ever discover whether this was true and if so why it was, because so far I had failed to understand what it might be an opportunity for. All I knew was that it carried a kind of honour, if you survived it, and left you in a relationship to the truth that seemed closer, but that in fact might have been identical to the truthfulness of staying in one place.

I could never reconcile myself to the fact that just as you've recovered from your own childhood, and finally crawled out of the pit of it and felt the sun on your face for the first time, you have to give up that place in the sun to a baby you're determined won't suffer the way you did, and crawl back down into another pit of self-sacrifice to make sure she doesn't!

Suffering had always appeared to me as an opportunity, I said, and I wasn't sure I would ever discover whether this was true and if so why it was, because so far I had failed to understand what it might be an opportunity for.

what] I couldn't understand was how the simple revelation of personal truth could lead to so much suffering and cruelty... I was naive to expect that other people would merely allow me to change when those changes directly interfered with their own interests.

Their father - her ex-husband - had relinquished all responsibility for them when the marriage ended: it almost gave him pleasure, Lawrence believed, to see them suffer, partly because their suffering dramatized his own - as bullies enjoy seeing their own fear in their victims - and partly because it was a sure-fire way of punishing (her)

What is the point of self pity if there is was nobody to pity you for it?

The memory of suffering had no effect whatever on what they elected to do: on the contrary, it compelled them to repeat it, for the suffering was the magic that caused the object to come back and allowed the delight in dropping it to become possible again. Had I refused to return it the very first time they dropped it, I suppose they would have learned something very different, though what that might have been I wasn't sure.

might even be their forgotten suffering at the hands of literary texts that had left behind this residue of respect for books; if, that is, psychoanalysts are to be believed when they say we are unconsciously drawn to the repetition of painful experiences.

The memory of suffering had no effect whatever on what they elected to do: on the contrary, it compelled them to repeat it, for the suffering was the magic that caused the object to come back and allowed the delight in dropping it to become possible again.

he felt the destruction had by now been earned in full by humanity...

It was human nature, his mother said, for people to wish cruelty on one another simply because they had been shown cruelty themselves: the repetition of behavioural forms was the curious panacea with which most people sought to relieve the suffering caused by precisely those same forms.

Why do we live so painfully in our fictions? Why do we suffer so, from the things we ourselves have invented?

Once Agnes had been in love and since then she had been in pain.

I am one of those who believes that without suffering there can be no art

Doer, dói sempre. Só não dói depois de morto. Porque a vida toda é um doer.

The more one suffered and lived, the more one had known of joy and grief, the deeper the response must be if an artist were great enough to summon it.

Come election time, black and white politicians put on their costumes of compassion and care, shake black hands, kiss black babies, sing 'We Shall Overcome' in black , and pray that we will ignore the reality of everyday suffering and the damage that is being done to our future in exchange for our votes.

There is so much vulgarity in the everyday, that when somebody has the pretension to do something extraordinary for the community, then you have to suffer.

On September 11 2001, America felt its vulnerability even to threats that gather on the other side of the Earth. We resolved then, and we are resolved today, to confront every threat from any source that could bring sudden terror and suffering to America.

Every day, we at the United Nations see the human toll of an absence of regulations or lax controls on the arms trade. We see it in the suffering of civilian populations trapped by armed conflict or pervasive crime. We see it in the killing and wounding of civilians - including children, the most vulnerable of all.

As a physician, my core drive is to help alleviate suffering and if sharing my story could help others in some way, perhaps I could find the courage to expose my most vulnerable self.