Quotes About Suffering

Once you stop swaddling the reality of the world's suffering in religious fantasies, you will feel in your bones just how precious life is—and, indeed, how unfortunate it is that millions of human beings suffer the most harrowing abridgements of their happiness for no good reason at all.

This is stressful—and spiritual life is a process of gradually unraveling our confusion and bringing this stress to an end. According to the Buddhist view, by seeing things as they are, we cease to suffer in the usual ways, and our minds can open to states of well-being that are intrinsic to the nature of consciousness.

ONE OF THE most pernicious effects of religion is that it tends to divorce morality from the reality of human and animal suffering.

Whatever the needs of the moment, I had a choice: I could do what was required calmly, patiently, and attentively, or do it in a state of panic. Every moment of the day—indeed, every moment throughout one's life—offers an opportunity to be relaxed and responsive or to suffer unnecessarily.

Meditation can open the mind to a similar range of conscious states, but far less haphazardly. If LSD is like being strapped to a rocket, learning to meditate is like gently raising a sail. Yes, it is possible, even with guidance, to wind up someplace terrifying, and some people probably shouldn't spend long periods in intensive practice. But the general effect of meditation training is of settling ever more fully into one's own skin and suffering less there.

It is worth remembering that if God created the world and all things in it, he created smallpox, plague, and filariasis.

One can traverse the Eastern paths simply by becoming interested in the nature of one's own mind—especially in the immediate causes of psychological suffering—and by paying closer attention to one's experience in every present moment. There is, in truth, nothing one need believe.

We spend our lives lost in thought. The question is, what should we make of this fact? In the West, the answer has been "Not much." In the East, especially in contemplative traditions like those of Buddhism, being distracted by thought is understood to be the very wellspring of human suffering.

While feeling love for others is surely one of the greatest source of happiness, it entails a very deep concern for the happiness and suffering of those we love. Our own search for happiness, therefore, provides a rationale for self-sacrifice and self-denial.

A rational approach to ethics becomes possible once we realize that questions of right and wrong are really questions about happiness and suffering of sentient creatures

According to the Buddhist teachings, human beings have a distorted view of reality that leads them to suffer unnecessarily. We grasp at transitory pleasures. We brood about the past and worry about the future. We continually seek to prop up and defend an egoic self that doesn't exist. This is stressful—and spiritual life is a process of gradually unraveling our confusion and bringing this stress to an end.

our failure to recognize thoughts as thoughts, as appearances in consciousness—is a primary source of human suffering.

Is there a happiness that does not depend upon having one's favorite foods available, or friends and loved ones within arm's reach, or good books to read, or something to look forward to on the weekend? Is it possible to be happy before anything happens, before one's desires are gratified, in spite of life's difficulties, in the very midst of physical pain, old age, disease, and death?

You believe that your religious concerns about sex, in all their tiresome immensity, have something to do with morality. And yet, your efforts to constrain the sexual behavior of consenting adults—and even to discourage your own sons and daughters from having premarital sex—are almost never geared toward the relief of human suffering.

If we are in a position to affect the happiness or suffering of others, we have ethical responsibilities toward them2—and many of these responsibilities are so grave as to become matters of civil and criminal law. Taking

It's hard to fuck your girlfriend when she's fucked up and you're not. It's harder than the skee-ball they used to have at the Plaza arcade, all that agony over a fuzzy piece.

A rich boy goes to college. He makes a lot of friends. They all think they are special and that they suffer in distinct ways, but they are all hurtling down the same world-historical funnel. They will attempt to professionalize their passions, or else just get jobs.

It feels like I have a raging fever, like my insides are melting. This must be what it feels like the moment before you die.

It hurts me to know that there are other women out there in the world that could make you happy.

Human life is every where a state in which much is to be endured, and little to be enjoyed.

How small of all that human hearts endure That part which laws or kings can cuse or cure!

This iron world (the same he weeping says)Brings down the stoutest hearts to lowest state:For misery doth bravest minds abate.Spens.Hubberd's Tale.

AMISSION  (AMI'SSION)   n.s.[amissio, Lat.]Loss.

See the hell of having a false woman! My bed shall be abused, my coffers ransacked, my reputation gnawn at; and I shall not only receive this villainous wrong, but stand under the adoption of abominable terms, and by him that does me the wrong.Shakesp.Merry Wives of Windsor.2. The