Quotes About Suffering

We need reassurance. We look to art for the proof that life in this world is meaningful and that suffering is not the pointless thing that it so often appears to be, but the necessary part of a larger and redeeming whole.

Tragedy reminds us that beauty is a redemptive presence in our lives: it is the face of love, shining in the midst of desolation.

Art, as we have known it, stands on the threshold of the transcendental. It points beyond this world of accidental and disconnected things to another realm, in which human life is endowed with an emotional logic that makes suffering noble and love worthwhile. Nobody who is alert to beauty, therefore, is without the concept of redemption – of a final transcendence of mortal disorder into a 'kingdom of ends.

The great artists of the past were aware that human life was full of chaos and suffering but they had a remedy for this and the name of that remedy was beauty. The beautiful work of art brings consolation in sorrow and affirmation in joy, it shows human life to be worthwhile

Art, as we have known it, stands on the threshold of the transcendental. It points beyond this world of accidental and disconnected things to another realm, in which human life is endowed with an emotional logic that makes suffering noble and love worthwhile. Nobody who is alert to beauty, therefore, is without the concept of redemption—of a final transcendence of mortal disorder into a 'kingdom of ends'. (p. 156)

I was not always that way, but perhaps the shadow Earth, where I spent so many years, mellowed me a bit, and maybe my hitch in the dungeons of Amber reminded me somewhat of the quality of human suffering. I do not know. I only know that I could not pass by the hurt I saw on the form of someone much like someone who had once been a friend.

Did life treat everyone so wantonly, ripping the good things to pieces while letting bad things fester and grow like fungus

But it was an unrefrigerated world. And everything ended badly.

The carnage upon the chessboard of life, left wounded humans in its wake

there was another, gorier parturition, when two nations incarnated out of one. A foreigner drew a magic line on a map and called it the new border; it became a river of blood upon the earth. And the orchards, fields, factories, businesses, all on the wrong side of that line, vanished with a wave of the pale conjuror's wand.

Hell has ways of permeating heaven's membrane.

Hell has ways of permeating heaven's membrane.

Losing, and losing again, is the very basis of the life process, till all we are left with is the bare essence of human existence.

Loss is essential. Loss is part and parcel of that necessary calamity called life.

Suicide How would I know I don't suffer any more, if I'm dead?

I live in my suffering and that makes me happy. Anything that keeps me from living in my suffering is unbearable to me.

In the sentence "She's no longer suffering," to what, to whom does "she" refer? What does that present tense mean?

Suffering is a form of egoism. I speak only of myself. I am not talking about her, saying what she was, making an overwhelming portrait (like the one Gide made of Madeleine). (Yet: everything is true: the sweetness, the energy, the nobility, the kindness.)

I ask for nothing but to live in my suffering.

Freud to his fiancée: The only thing that makes me suffer is being in a situation where it is impossible for me to prove my love to you Gide: Everything in her behaviour seemed to say: Since he no longer loves me, nothing matters to me. Now, I still loved her, and in fact I had never loved her so much; but it was no longer possible for me to prove it to her. That was much the worst thing of all

People tell you to keep your courage up. But the time for courage is when she was sick, when I took care of her and saw her suffering, her sadness, and when I had to conceal my tears. Constantly one had to make a decision, put on a mask and that was courage. --Now, courage means the will to live and there's all too much of that.

Everything pains me. The merest trifle rouses a sense of abandonment. I'm impatient with other people, their will to live, their universe. Attracted by a decision to withdraw from everyone [no longer bearing the world of Y].

Either woe or well-being, sometimes I have a craving to be engulfed. This morning (in the country), the weather is mild, overcast. I am suffering (from some incident). The notion of suicide occurs to me…Another day, in the rain, we're waiting for the boat at the lake; from happiness, this time, the same outburst of annihilation sweeps through me.

Suffering; impossibility of being comfortable anywhere; oppression, irritations and remorse one after the next, everything under the sign wretchedness of man, used by Pascal.