Quotes About Suffering

To see others suffer does one good, to make others suffer even more: this is a hard saying but an ancient, mighty, human, all-too-human principle [....] Without cruelty there is no festival.

Christianity was from the beginning, essentially and fundamentally, life's nausea and disgust with life, merely concealed behind, masked by, dressed up as, faith in another or better life.

Man is the cruelest animal, says Zarathustra. When gazing at tragedies, bull-fights, crucifixations he hath hitherto felt happier than at any other time on Earth. And when he invented Hell...lo, Hell was his Heaven on Earth; he could put up with suffering now, by contemplating the eternal punishment of his oppressors in the other world.

The best of all things is something entirely outside your grasp: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second best thing for you is to die soon.

I overcame myself, the sufferer; I carried my own ashes to the mountains; I invented a brighter flame for myself.

Man, the bravest of animals, and the one most accustomed to suffering, does not repudiate suffering as such; he desires it, he even seeks it out, provided he is shown a meaning for it, a purpose of suffering. The meaninglessness of suffering, not suffering itself, was the curse that lay over mankind so far.

Almost everything we call higher culture is based on the spiritualization of cruelty.

What really raises one's indignation against suffering is not suffering intrinsically, but the senselessness of suffering

And when he invented his hell, that was his heaven on earth.

It is invisible hands that torment and bend us the worst

The tension of the soul in unhappiness, which cultivates its strength; its horror at the sight of the great destruction; its inventiveness and bravery in bearing, enduring, interpreting, exploiting unhappiness, and whatever in the way of depth, mystery, mask, spirit, cleverness, greatness the heart has been granted - has it not been granted them through suffering, through the discipline of great suffering?

It was suffering and incapacity that created all afterworlds - this, and that brief madness of bliss which is experienced only by those who suffer deeply. Weariness that wants to reach the ultimate with one leap, with one fatal leap, a poor ignorant weariness that does not want to want any more: this created all gods and afterworlds.

It is intoxicating joy for the sufferer to look away from his suffering and to forget himself.

Do you love tragedies and everything that breaks the heart?

I suffer: someone or other must be guilty' – and every sick sheep thinks the same.

The worst mutilation of man that can be imagined presented as the good man.

How much blood and horror is at the bottom of all 'good things'!

The tragedy is that we cannot believe the dogmas of religion and metaphysics if we have the strict methods of truth in heart and head, but on the other hand, we have become through the development of humanity so tenderly suffering that we need the highest kind of means of salvation and consolation: whence arises the danger that man may bleed to death through the truth that he realises.

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

The certain prospect of death could sweeten every life with a precious and fragrant drop of levity; and now you strange apothecary souls have turned it into an ill-tasting drop of poison that makes the whole of life repulsive.

Only great pain is the ultimate liberator of the spirit….I doubt that such pain makes us 'better'; but I know that it makes us more profound.

Creating—that is the great salvation from suffering, and life's alleviation. But for the creator to appear, suffering itself is needed, and much transformation. Yea, much bitter dying must there be in your life, ye creators! Thus are ye advocates and justifiers of all perishableness. For the creator himself to be the new-born child, he must also be willing to be the child-bearer, and endure the pangs of the child-bearer.

Christianity is the metaphysics of the hangman.

How could you rise anew if you have not first become ashes?