Quotes About Suffering

Sympathy with joy intensifies the sum of sympathy in the world, sympathy with pain does not really diminish the amount of pain.

Those who have never been ill are incapable of real sympathy for a great many misfortunes

Anyone who has gone through great suffering is bound to have a greater sympathy and understanding of the problems of mankind.

It is much more easy to have sympathy with suffering than it is to have sympathy with thought.

We should have a bond of sympathy for all sentient beings, knowing that only the depraved and base take pleasure in the sight of blood and suffering.

Sympathy is a shallow stream in the souls of those who have not suffered.

The world is full of tragedy; and sympathy, a little common sympathy, can do so much to soften the worst of grief. It is for the lack of that, that people despair and go down.

There is something very morbid about modern sympathy with pain.

To those who fall and hurt themselves one runs with comfort; by those who lie dangerously stricken by a disease one sits and waits.

What really arouses indignation against suffering is not suffering as such but the senselessness of suffering...

Only great pain is, as the teacher of great suspicion, the ultimate liberator of the spirit...I doubt whether such pain improves us-but I do know it deepens us.

Caught in the self-centered dream, only suffering; holding to self-centered thoughts, exactly the dream; each moment, life as it is, the only teacher; being just this moment, compassion's way.

Teach me, O Lord, to glory in my cross. Teach me the value of my thorns. Show me how I have climbed to You through my path of pain. Show me that it is through my tears that I have seen rainbows.

I claim that in losing the spinning wheel we lost our left lung. We are, therefore, suffering from galloping consumption. The restoration of the wheel arrests the progress of the fell disease.

As the questions grow harder and more complicated, people yearn for simpler answers, one-sentence answers, answers that point unhesitatingly to a culprit who can be blamed for all our suffering, answers that promise that if we only eradicate the villains, all our troubles will vanish.

It is such a pretty story, told to me by a Cuban woman I met in a bar at the beach. She left the bar before I did; a drunken man took her place. He leaned into me and said, I see in your dark eyes that you have suffered, and you have compassion, and I have suffered, and I have compassion, and I see in your eyes that I can say things to you-- My eyes are blue, I said.

Some of us are silent sufferers of a noisy disease.

Alcuni di noi soffrono in silenzio di un male rumoroso. E questo è quanto ho da dire sulla paura.

The Holocaust began to represent more than the horrific suffering of the Jewish people in the past—now it also signified an imminent threat to the future of the Jewish state. A past atrocity in Europe came to foreshadow an impending apocalypse in the Middle East.

Desperation, not desire, is the root of atrocity.

IT IS one thing to accumulate woes bit by bit over the course of a lifetime. quite another to enter this world with impossible burdens, by no doing of your own, and find yourself unequipped to handle them and/or find that, despite every conceivable effort, they are mercilessly unshakable.

When Jesus was born, he was already the son of God. I was the daughter of someone who ran away, a big disgrace. And when Jesus suffered, everyone worshipped him. Nobody worshipped me for living with Wen Fu. I was like that wife of Kitchen God. Nobody worshipped me either. He got all the excuses. He got all the credit. She was forgotten.

I was the daughter of my father's wife. I spoke in a trembly voice. I became pale, ill, and more thin. I let myself become a wounded animal. I let the hunter come to me and turn me into a tiger ghost. I willingly gave up my chi , the spirit that caused me so much pain. Now I was a tiger that neither pounced nor lay waiting between the trees. I became an unseen spirit.

We were all afraid. We all had our miseries. But to despair was to wish back for something already lost. Or to prolong what was already unbearable.