Quotes About Suffering

The God who had thrust him through in the darkness with probings of dread and shame was the same God who now held out the sword and shield.

In what he suffered, as in all true suffering and in true joy, there was the quality of eternity. He could not believe it would ever end.

I mean, you may cause others a spot of bother by your weaknesses, perhaps, but coping with you may possibly increase their strength and sympathy. But if you sin deliberately, even if it seems only against yourself--well--you won't be the only one to suffer. You may even be the one who suffers least.

But no, he did not believe in capricious fortune, but in a carefully woven pattern where every tightly stretched warp thread of pain laid the foundation for a woof thread of joy.

He supposed he was one of those unfortunates born with a great capacity for suffering.... He opened his eyes a moment and they were dark with fear, for only one race was run as yet and there might be many others.... Then his newborn courage came back to him and he accepted his suffering as the price he must pay for the gift of creation that was his. And suffering, he had discovered, could be the gateway to renewal, than which no more glorious experience can be man's on earth.

Unbelief was easier than belief, much less demanding and subtly flattering because the agnostic felt himself to be intellectually superior to the believer. And then unbelief haunted by faith, as she knew by experience, produced a rather pleasant nostalgia, while belief haunted by doubt involved real suffering.

Since she had had to lead this shut-in invalid life she had found illness involved suffering almost as much from the tyranny of painful thoughts as from physical pain

Illness was admirable training in the creative art of grateful acceptance. Pain accepted was just pain, and heavy, but Harriet believed that pain gladly accepted took wings, went somewhere and did something.

Suffering had had an effect with which she was familiar. The refusal of self-pity and despair had turned it from lead to fire, burning up the subterfuges and dishonesties below the surface of the inherited veneer of manners and thought that most men and women think are their true selves, and the veneer with them.

People talk a lot of ballyhoo about suffering improving you. I should say that what it does is to underline what you were before.

They are truly peacemakers who amidst all they suffer in this world maintain peace in soul and body for the love of our Lord Jesus Christ. WRITINGS OF SAINT FRANCIS

He saw now that [compassion] was the very first necessity, always and everywhere, and should flow between all men, always and everywhere. Men lived with their nearest and dearest and knew little of them, and strangers passing by in the street were as impersonal as trees walking, and all the while there was this deep affinity, for all men suffered.

There was a streak of austerity in him that welcomed hardship, and even, he imagined, was ready to welcome pain. It bred courage, it sifted the true from the false, and courage and truth were companions who would outpace all the others; when dreams had withered and happiness was forgotten they were still there. For their sakes he was prepared to suffer much himself and to see others suffer. Lucilla had been right to recognize in his face that night a hint of ruthlessness.

Have you ever seen a bird without its beak? Horrible, just tiny dead eyes and a hole in its face.

She put her hand to cover up her mouth, like somehow by shielding this part of her body she could protect the rest of it from the terrible pain about to come...

She looked as though everything that she didn't like had happened to her.

Something terrible had happened in his life to send him back to her looking for revenge. He believed she had been unlucky for him and was to be blamed for some calamity, some failure or loss. But he didn't want to tell her about it; he just wanted her to suffer and be reduced, in his imagination and her own. There was no point in understanding any of this if she couldn't see a way through it.

Too bad, how sad, life's a bitch and then you die.

Happy!" retorted Christopher. "What would you do if you met your best friend in hell? Say you were happy to know he was there, too, and isn't the pitch hot?

This had to be Hell.Well, my Hell, and funnily enough, my Hell was in a church, surrounded by people I—either do or did—love.

I've been as good as dead since the day I was born. I accepted that a very long time ago.

No wound. No scar? Yet as the Master shall the servant be, And pierced are the feet that follow Me, But thine are whole, Can he have followed far who has no wound, No scar?

God does not waste our suffering. It always serves a purpose.

Silence will put us in touch with yearnings, anxieties, pain, despair, envy, competition, and a host of other feelings that need to be put into words if we are to move toward a place of centeredness and come into possession of our lives. The fact is that most of us have an incredible amount of unfaced suffering in our histories that has to be looked at and worked through.