Quotes About Suffering

I was deeply interested in conveying what is a deeply felt conviction of my own. This is simply to suggest that human beings must involve themselves in the anguish of other human beings. This, I submit to you, is not a political thesis at all. It is simply an expression of what I would hope might be ultimately a simple humanity for humanity's sake.

the word 'stoical' has entered the languages of today to describe patient endurance in the face of suffering.

Thousands of those who had fought alongside the Macedonians were sold into slavery.

Of the Melian population the Athenians executed all the grown men

Medicine, Miss Landgrave, is for physical pain, not metaphysical pain.

War leaves a legacy of human suffering that does not end with peace.

distant as the death of grocery chickens.

The cause of our suffering is not what we do, but the way we perceive.

Christ's first coming was to fulfill a mission, a purpose. He came to suffer, die, and be raised again. These happened and yielded results effective for the present time and into eternity.

When the Spaniard Pero Tafur visited, he found even the emperor's palace "in such a state that both it and the city show well the evils which the people have suffered and still endure … the city is sparsely populated … the inhabitants are not well clad, but sad and poor, showing the hardship of their lot," before adding with true Christian charity, "which is, however, not as bad as they deserve, for they are a vicious people, steeped in sin.

All the inhabitants of Cyprus are slaves to the Venetians," wrote the visitor Martin von Baumgarten in 1508, "obliged to pay to the state a third of all their increase or income…and which is more, there is yearly some tax or other imposed on them, with which the poor common people are so flayed and pillaged that they hardly have the wherewithal to keep soul and body together.

Taken to their logical conclusion, that even hell and all who will suffer there eternally are foreordained by God, God is thereby rendered morally ambiguous at best and a moral monster at worst.

no theology is worth believing that cannot be preached standing in front of the gates of Auschwitz.

Why do we write? "To make suffering endurable To make evil intelligible To make justice desirable and . . . to make love possible

Not the torturer will scare me, nor the body's final fall, nor the barrels of death's rifles, nor the shadows on the wall, nor the night when to the ground the last dim star of pain, is hurled but the blind indifference of a merciless, unfeeling world.

There are people who think that wrestling is an ignoble sport. Wrestling is not sport, it is a spectacle, and it is no more ignoble to attend a wrestled performance of suffering than a performance of the sorrows of Arnolphe or Andromaque.

As a jealous man, I suffer four times over: because I am jealous, because I blame myself for being so, because I fear that my jealousy will wound the other, because I allow myself to be subject to a banality: I suffer from being excluded, from being aggressive, from being crazy, and from being common.

Don't say mourning. It's too psychoanalytic. I'm not mourning. I'm suffering.

in the midst of suffering, it was important to remember one thing: everyone suffered. Some more, some less; some now, some later; some in one way, some in another. But no one was exempt. It was, he said, a lesson, not a punishment. She closed her eyes and bowed her head. Some women were given children; others were not. Some women had parents

I have tried, I still try, to do what I can to ease the suffering on this earth, and I'm sure you do the same. The rest of it we have to allow to be, as painful as that is for us. We have to care for ourselves and our loved ones. We have to serve others to the extent we are able. And the rest of it we have to allow to be. It is awful, is it not, the human predicament? Awful and beautiful.

Con los borrachos lo único que se podía hacer era retrasar las cosas, antes o después, se volvían a hundir.

the Buddha whimsically pointed out that seeking happiness in one's material desires is as absurd as "suffering because a banana tree will not bear mangoes.

It is highly significant and indeed almost a rule, that moral courage has its source in such identification through one's own sensitivity with suffering of one's fellow human beings." (p. 16-17)

One does not become fully human painlessly