Quotes About Suffering

Being in recovery for a lot of years now, I've worked with a lot of people who've gotten sober and sat with a lot of folks who are suffering. Bearing witness is a really underrated thing; it's a big damn deal.

There are some things that you see that are hard to talk about. You can't talk about it. You just bear witness to them.

Empathy is the faculty to resonate with the feelings of others. When we meet someone who is joyful, we smile. When we witness someone in pain, we suffer in resonance with his or her suffering.

At its best, fiction cultivates fantasy and compassion; at its worst, memoir provokes schadenfreude and prurience. The ugly truth, I fear, is that many people are drawn to sensational memoirs for the same reason they watch 'The Apprentice': they like to witness actual suffering, before-your-very-eyes humiliation.

My mother had Alzheimer's, and it's a desperately, desperately cruel thing to witness.

Unfortunately, I have witnessed millions of children suffering from the deprivation of basic rights such as the rights to education, the rights to health and the rights to play.

As the Ebola virus continued to consume my patients, I witnessed the horror this disease visits upon its victims, the intense pain and humiliation of those who suffer with it.

I sleep in peace, even if only in the company of lice, behind bars. The same could not be said of my incarcerators though they sleep in warm beds, next to their wives, in their homes.

All in all, 18 individuals from my family are missing, including my six brothers and my mother, my brothers' wives, my nephews and nieces.

Woe to the conquered.

It's been like a bad dream I never woke from.

The three touchstones that woke Buddha up - sickness, old age, and death - are a pretty good place to start when crafting a tragic tale. And if we need to get more specific: heartbreak, destruction, miscomprehension, natural disasters, betrayal, and the waste of human potential.

We were poor, my mother and I, living in a world of doom and gloom, pessimism and bitterness, where storms raged and wolves scratched at the door.

Even the classics that we read to our young children are full of wolves' fangs and burning ovens and bloody feet and ice shards piercing hearts. Even the New Testament climaxes with an act of unspeakable torture. Might as well just read to our kids from the Amnesty Annual Report and be done with it.

I've already told you: the only way to a woman's heart is along the path of torment. I know none other as sure.

You forget that the kingdom of heaven suffers violence: and the kingdom of heaven is like a woman.

No one can doubt that the sufferings of the sober, virtuous woman, in legal subjection to the mastership of a drunken, immoral husband and father over herself and children, not only from physical abuse, but from spiritual shame and humiliation, must be such as the man himself can not possibly comprehend.

Women have a predestination to suffering.

Egypt was the first democracy in the Middle East. Women were unveiled in the 1920s. Egypt is a country of civilization, of culture. It shouldn't be suffering.

Terrorists bombard complete cities, such as Fallujah, Baghdad, innocent women and children.

There is no doubt that women and children on this planet are the people who suffer the most on many levels... Lots of boys around this planet are being taught right now that girls are lesser than them. This is toxic to everybody, and boys deserve better.

Terrorists and terrorism cannot be eliminated any more than we can rid the world of disease. There will always be those who will resort to force against innocent men, women, and children in pursuit of political goals.

I don't want to constantly berate my father - I wish him well, and I hope he finds peace - but he put my mom through years of mental abuse, and it made me care especially for abandoned women and children.

A great number of the women are victims to falling of the womb and weakness in the spine; but these are necessary results of their laborious existence, and do not belong either to climate or constitution.