Quotes About Suffering

All suffering is caused by my identifying myself with something, whether that something is within me or outside of me.

Suffering is a sign that you're out of touch with the truth. Suffering is given to you that you might open your eyes to the truth, that you might understand that there's falsehood somewhere, just as physical pain is given to you so you will understand that there is disease or illness somewhere.

Your life as it is now: nightmare. Every single thing you cling to and have convinced yourself you cannot be happy without: nightmare.

When your illusions clash with reality, when your falsehoods clash with truth, then you have suffering. Otherwise there is no suffering.

To come to the land of love, you must pass through the pains of death, for to love persons means to die to the need for persons and to be utterly alone.

Now the tragedy of an attachment is that if its object is not attained it causes unhappiness. But if it is attained, it does not cause happiness—it merely causes a flash of pleasure followed by weariness; and it is always accompanied, of course, by the anxiety that you may lose the object of your attachment.

There is no explanation you can give that would explain away all the sufferings and evil and torture and destruction and hunger in the world! You'll never explain it. You can try gamely with your formulas, religious and otherwise, but you'll never explain it. Because life is a mystery, which means your thinking mind cannot make sense out of it. For that you've got to wake up and then you'll suddenly

Lo que necesitas no es renunciar, sino comprender, tomar conciencia. Si tus apegos te han ocasionado sufrimiento y aflicción, ésa es una buena ayuda para comprender. Si

But God is only a white cold eye, a quarter-moon poised above the smoke, blinking, blinking, as the city is gradually pounded to dust.

It was hard to live through the early 1940s in France and not have the war be the center from which the rest of your life spiraled. Marie-Laure still cannot wear shoes that are too large, or smell a boiled turnip, without experiencing revulsion. Neither can she listen to lists of names. Soccer team rosters, citations at the end of journals, introductions at faculty meetings – always they seem to her some vestige of the prison lists that never contained her father's name.

Who will lie on her back and let her last breath curl up to the ceiling as a curse upon the invaders.

Knock him on the head with the umbrella stand? Jab him with the paring knife? Scream. Die. Papa.

All her life she has been told to believe, tried to believe, wanted to believe, that if a person suffers long enough, works hard enough, then she—like Ulysses washing up on the shore of the kingdom of brave Alcinous—will ultimately reach a better place. That through suffering we are redeemed. That by dying we live again. And maybe in the end that's the easier thing. But Anna is tired of suffering. And she is not ready to die.

This is not real suffering, she tells herself. this is only a matter of reprogramming her picture of the future. Of understanding that the line of descendancy is not continuous but arbitrary.

It was hard to live through the early 1940s in France and not have the war be the center from which the rest of your life spiraled.

The soldiers throw a bag over whomever they want to remove, run electricity through him, and then that person is gone, vanished. Expelled to some other world.

Only through the hottest fires, whispers the radio, can purification be achieved. Only through the harshest tests can God's chosen rise.

Strange how suffering can look beautiful if you get far enough away.

she's hardly there: just morphine and glassy eyes and an odor that carries him back to Korea.

This look?" Bastian says, and flourishes his fat hand. "The way he's got nothing left? A German soldier never reaches this point. There's a name for this look. It's

This look?" Bastian says, and flourishes his fat hand. "The way he's got nothing left? A German soldier never reaches this point. There's a name for this look. It's called 'circling the drain.'

All her life she has been told to believe, tried to believe, wanted to believe, that if a person suffers long enough, works hard enough, then she—like Ulysses washing up on the shore of the kingdom of brave Alcinous—will ultimately reach a better place. That through suffering we are redeemed. That by dying we live again. And maybe in the end that's the easier thing.

This is a double cruelty: that everything else keeps living, that the spinning earth does not pause for even an instant in its trip around the sun.

Maybe his body is giving up. If he does not eat, he understands, he will die. But when he does eat, he fells as if he will die.