Quotes About Suffering

The grim egoism (egotism) of mourning of suffering

Paradoxically (since people say: Work, amuse yourself, see friends) it's when we're busy, distracted, sought out, exteriorized, that we suffer most. Inwardness, calm, solitude makes us less miserable.

A delirium, however, does not exist unless one wakens from it(there are only retrospective deliriums): one day, I realize what has happened to me: I thought I was suffering from not being loved, and yet it is because I thought I was loved that I was suffering; I lived in the complication of supposing myself simultaneously loved and abandoned. Anyone hearing my intimate language would have had to exclaim, as of a difficult child: But after all, what does he want?

Miseries of a birth.

The lover's discourse is in a sense a series of No Exits

Comme jaloux, je souffre quatre fois : parce que je suis jaloux, parce que je me reproche de l'être, parce que je crains que ma jalousie ne blesse l'autre, parce que je me laisse assujettir à une banalité : je souffre d'être exclu, d'être agressif, d'être fou et d'être commun.

In wrestling, as on the stage in antiquity, one is not ashamed of one's suffering, one knows how to cry, one has a liking for tears.

Tell my mother I stopped feeling frightened once I told myself they couldn't inflict half as much pain on me as she suffered when she gave birth to me.

With a soil and climate scarcely equaled in the world," he protested, Mexico "has more poor and starving subjects who are willing and able to work than any country in the world. The rich keep down the poor with a hardness of heart that is incredible.

In other words, Julia still believed in the beneficial effects of tobacco long after her husband had likely died from it. Even grimacing with pain, Grant tracked presidential politics intently.

He would smile at times, but I never heard him laugh aloud," said Louisa Boggs. "He was a sad man . . . he seemed almost in despair."124 Grant seemed to be staring into an abyss. "I don't think he saw a light ahead—not a particle. I don't think he had any ambition further than to educate and take care of his family.

He immediately had Rawlins summon stretcher bearers, but was dismayed when they removed the Union officer and overlooked the Confederate private. "Take this Confederate, too," he said. "Take them both together; the war is over between them." Grant seemed sickened by the carnage. "Let's get away from this dreadful place," he told an officer. "I suppose this work is part of the devil that is left in us all.

Sherman did not want to have to feed its citizens or assign extra troops to guard a sullen, restive population and ordered the evacuation of all residents. When the mayor pleaded that such an exodus would result in "appalling and heart-rending suffering," Sherman replied in lapidary prose: "War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it . . . You might as well appeal against the thunder storm

To endure such suffering required stoicism reminiscent of the ancient Romans, so Washington had his favorite play, Addison's Cato, the story of a self-sacrificing Roman statesman, staged at Valley Forge to buck up his weary men.

He had suffered many personal misfortunes in marriage and exercised woefully bad judgment.

While Tarbell's articles were running, Rockefeller, his wife, his son, and two of his three daughters were afflicted by serious medical problems or nervous strain.

What God had taken away, it seems, could never be perfectly restored.

Sherman did not want to have to feed its citizens or assign extra troops to guard a sullen, restive population and ordered the evacuation of all residents. When the mayor pleaded that such an exodus would result in "appalling and heart-rending suffering," Sherman replied in lapidary prose: "War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it . . . You might as well appeal against the thunder storm as against these terrible hardships of war.

The misfortune of those women was my good luck, their misery my escape.

Every time I had seen men rise up, they had not prevailed and innocent people had died. Daddy

The Soviets had lost fifteen thousand lives and suffered more than thirty thousand casualties. Between a million and two million Afghans perished, perhaps 90 percent of them civilians. Villages were razed, crops and livestock destroyed, the landscape studded with mines. A third of the population sheltered in refugee camps in Pakistan or Iran.

I had never felt like that before, as if there were a sort of curse, a merciless force in the light that shone on a world where life is borken and lost, where each new day takes something from the day that precedes it, where suffering is inmovable...

On his day of demobilization a lugubrious one-armed, one-eyed brigadier wished him well and then added, apropos of nothing, "Mark my words, Moutier, a great war leaves a country with three armies: an army of cripples, an army of mourners, and an army of thieves.

The Devil's favorite part of hell.