Quotes About Suffering

Writing my novel 'The Narrow Road to the Deep North,' I came to conclude that great crimes like the Death Railway did not begin with the first beating or murder on that grim line of horror in 1943.

Still falls the rain - dark as the world of man, black as our loss - blind as the nineteen hundred and forty nails upon the Cross.

I was on my way to fetch my little sister from school when I met with an accident. A bike which was at a very high speed ran over my leg while I was crossing the road. My leg was so badly fractured that it took me almost seven months to be able to stand on my legs again.

War is devastating, and it leaves its scars for generations.

There's nothing glamorous about war at all.

For long years I felt torn between the greatest grief and the greatest love. . . . Whenever I attempted to sing of love, it turned to pain. And again, when I tried to sing of pain, it turned to love. Thus were love and pain divided in me.

I miei padri, che rivivono in me e che hanno indicibilmente sofferto, lo sentono. Tutta la mia sostanza vitale lo sente. No, tu non puoi comprendere, Giulietta. Chi non è mai stato odiato a cagione della sua razza non può comprendere

Which is more puzzling, the existence of suffering or its frequent absence?

But if they were condmened to suffer this unending torment, sooner or later wouldn't they become the holy?

In an almost totally insentient cosmos only human feeling is interesting or relevant to what the soul searches for...suffering is the most expensive of human emotions, but it is the most intense and precious of them, because suffering most efficiently humanizes the unfeeling universe.

Rosie, maybe I'm a masochist, but I think the world of you. You're the most beautiful girl I've ever seen and you've got no idea. You think it's any fun for me to sit here being loathed by you? I'm in love with you.

To live is to suffer,to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering

Joy is a mystery because it can happen anywhere, anytime, even under the most unpromising circumstances, even in the midst of suffering, with tears in its eyes....

What's lost is nothing to what's found, and all the death that ever was, set next to life, would scarcely fill a cup.

You have to suffer in order to be beautiful.

To sentimentalise something is to look only at the emotion in it and at the emotion it stirs in us rather than at the reality of it, which we are always tempted not to look at because reality, truth, silence are all what we are not much good at and avoid when we can. To sentimentalise something is to savour rather than to suffer the sadness of it, is to sigh over the prettiness of it rather than to tremble at the beauty of it, which may make fearsome demands of us or pose fearsome threats.

The world is in pain, and its pain makes strangers of us all and ties my tongue in a lover's knot.

This side of Nirvana, there is no such escape for any of us as far as I know.

When Godric banished Fairweather and Tune, they all three bled for it, and part of Godric snaked off too, nevermore to come again. And it's Godric's flesh that Ailred's cough cleaves to like an axe. And when brave Mouse went down off Wales, he bore to the bottom the cut of Godric's sharp farewell. And when Gillian vanished in a Dover wood, she took with her all but the husk of Godric's joy.

In winter when the snow and ice were fierce, we shook beneath our different roofs alone, and that's what Hell is like, I think. It's cold and shame and shaking. And worst of all, it's loneliness.

Christ never promises peace in the sense of no more struggle and suffering. Instead, he helps us to struggle and suffer as he did, in love for one another.

Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom,' the good thief said from his cross. (Luke 23:42). There are perhaps no more human words in all of Scripture, no prayer we can pray so well." ? Frederick Buechner, Listening to Your Life: Daily Meditations with Frederick Buechner

Freedom now appeared, to disappear no more forever. It was heard in every sound and seen in every thing. It was very present to torment me with a sense of my wretched condition. I saw nothing without seeing it, I heard nothing without hearing it, and felt nothing without feeling it. It looked from every star, it smiled in every calm, breathed in every wind, and moved in every storm.

We have men sold to build churches, women sold to support the gospel, and babes sold to purchase Bibles for the poor heathen, all for the glory of God and the good of souls. The slave auctioneer's bell and the church-going bell chime in with each other, and the bitter cries of the heart-broken slave are drowned in the religious shouts of his pious master. Revivals of religion and revivals in the slave trade go hand in hand.