Quotes About Suffering

From birth to death, man is the slave of the same external dimension that rules animals. Throughout his life he doesn't live, he vegetatively thrives, with greater intensity and complexity than an animal.

I am no pessimist. Happy are those who can make of their suffering something universal. I don't know if the world is sad or bad, nor do I care, because I feel bored and indifferent in the face of other people's suffering.

Bastaba con mirarle la cara, agónica y miope, para comprender que a partir del primer día de la creación todo habían sido ya disgustos para él.

Pero el sufrimiento pasa. Si la vida, que es todo, pasa, por qué no han de pasar el amor y el dolor y todas las demás cosas, que no son más que partes de la vida.

Io sarò anche Satana, Belzebù, quello che vi pare, ma so cos'è il dolore perchè io stesso l'ho provato e lo provo tuttora per la mia solitudine, per l'odio che hai suscitato contro di me. Insomma, ti confesso che quel poveretto mi fa compassione. E che vorrei dargli una mano.

The new 'Dunkirk spirit' is a kind of hysteria in which the ordinary vicissitudes of life (especially those involving Brits abroad among foreigners) are raised to the level of epic suffering.

The meanest bloody thing in hell made this world.

Joe had been explaining things in the meantime. He said it was again the beginning of the unfinished, the re-discovery of the familiar, the re-experience of the already suffered, the fresh-forgetting of the unremembered. Hell goes round and round. In shape it is circular and by nature it is interminable, repetitive and very nearly unbearable.

All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it, but most people think of these stories as hard, hopeless and brutal.

Grace changes us and change is painful.

the only thing that makes the Church endurable is that it is somehow the body of Christ and that on this we are fed. It seems to be a fact that you have to suffer as much from the Church as for it but if you believe in the divinity of Christ, you have to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it.

What people don't realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross.

I'm a member and preacher to that church where the blind don't see and the lame don't walk and what's dead stays that way.

Give me the courage to stand the pain to get the grace.

You don't serve God by saying: the Church is ineffective, I'll have none of it. Your pain at its lack of effectiveness is a sign of your nearness to God. We help overcome this lack of effectiveness simply by suffering on account of it.

Our spiritual character is formed as much by what we endure and what is taken from us as it is by our achievements and our conscious choices.

Simone Weil's] life is almost a perfect blend of the Comic and the Terrible, which two things may be opposite sides of the same coin. In my own experience, everything funny I have written is more terrible than it is funny, or only funny because it is terrible, or only terrible because it is funny.

Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away.

Its face was like the face she had seen in some medieval paintings where the martyr's limbs are being sawed off and his expression says he is being deprived of nothing essential.

Julian thought he could have stood his lot better if she had been selfish, if she had been an old hag who drank and screamed at him. He walked along, saturated in depression, as if in the midst of his martyrdom he had lost his faith.

I'm a member and preacher to that church where the blind don't see and the lame don't walk and what's dead stay's that way. Ask me about that church and I'll tell you it's the church that the blood of Jesus don't foul with redemption...Jesus was a liar.

He saw that for the rest of his days, frail, racked, but enduring, he would live in the face of a purifying terror. A feeble cry, a last impossible protest escaped him. But the Holy Ghost, emblazoned in ice instead of fire, continued, implacable, to descend.

She would have been a good woman if there had been somebody to shoot her every day of her life.

I call myself The Misfit, he said, because I can't make what all I done wrong fit what all I gone through in punishment. Flannery O'Connor, A Good Man Is Hard To Find