Quotes About Suffering

I can assure you of one thing, — the more men you see die, the easier it becomes to die yourself; and in my opinion, death may be a torture, but it is not an expiation.

the world is no fit place for human beings. we harm and ache.

Ours is a world where people don't know what they want and are willing to go through hell to get it.

Suffering can thus be seen in large part as a kind of resistance or reactivity to the pain of the present moment. (p. 74)

Enmeshed in collective hatred and anger, each side proclaims the crimes of the other and its own righteousness, is unable to listen to the others suffering, and cannot look at the deeper roots of the conflict and how we often need our enemies in order to maintain our rigid identities. (p. 53)

You are already tearing my heart in two. What difference would more pain matter?" "If

Why is it that when we lose something big, we begin to lose everything else along with it?

Sometimes I get bored riding down the beautiful streets of L.A. I know it sounds crazy, but I just want to go to New York and see people suffer.

We are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us; we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be. —C. S. Lewis It

Shattered by the cumulative effect of so much horror and death, Joan was again afflicted by a crisis of faith. How could a good and benevolent God let such a thing happen? How could He so terribly afflict even children and babies, who were not guilty of any sin?

Suffering ceases to be suffering in some way at the moment it finds a meaning." — Viktor Frankl (psychiatrist who survived a Nazi concentration camp and wrote about his experiences in Man's Search for Meaning)

Once you abandon the idea of a personal baseline, it becomes possible to think of emotional suffering as relapse—instead of something to be expected from an individual's way of being in the world.

We aren't suggesting that mental instability or unhappiness makes one a better poet, or a poet at all; and contrary to the romantic notion of the artist suffering for his or her work, we think these writers achieved brilliance in spite of their suffering, not because of it.

Lincoln had internalized the pain of those around him—the wounded soldiers, the captured prisoners, the defeated Southerners. Little wonder that he was overwhelmed at times by a profound sadness that even his own resilient temperament could not dispel.

suffering does not ennoble. It destroys. To resist destruction, self-hatred, or lifelong hopelessness, we have to throw off the conditioning of being despised, the fear of becoming the they that is talked about so dismissively, to refuse lying myths and easy moralities, to see ourselves as human, flawed, and extraordinary. All of us extraordinary

He couldn't make her understand that. She'd not been educated beyond simple words. To her the most bitter cup was to be cut away from life. To lose this amber hair, this crimson mouth, this molten flesh; to receive in its place the cold ash of oblivion. He repeated, "There's worse things. There's wishing you could die. There's wishing you could close your eyes and your memory forever.

I felt, even at fifteen, that God meant man to be happy, that He meant to provide him with what he needed to maintain life in order to be happy, and that we did not need to have quite so much destruction and misery as I saw all around and read of in the daily press.

Life in community with broken people will always include such disappointments. But they can be met with resilience, and with a faith in the eternal significance of a life lived with the suffering. Such a life will never be easy or tidy; the work is endless and will always stretch on before us.

When I think of the human suffering, the terrible amount of energy needed to move even infinitesimally toward a more decent life I am amazed at human patience.

quite the same as approving of it. She wondered, for instance, how Columbus or Magellan would react if they could see them all sitting in comfortable chairs watching a movie in the sky as they crossed the ocean insulated from wind, tides, storm and distance, and without any decent sense of awe. One ought, she felt, to suffer just a little. Not much but a little.

Sometimes living with him is like being told to hold my breath as a matter of life and death - but never being told when to let that breath out. So I don't know what to do for the best. To let out that breath and suffer the consequences or to keep holding on no matter what it does to me.

When you love someone, them being hurt is worse than any pain that you could suffer.

Guns aren't lawful; nooses give; gas smells awful. So you might as well live.

Résumé Razors pain you, Rivers are damp, Acids stain you, And drugs cause cramp. Guns aren't lawful, Nooses give, Gas smells awful. You might as well live.