Quotes About Suffering

No hay esperanza para el vagabundo que está de pie en el magistrado. Si a través de sus balbuceos brota algo desgarrador que atraviesa el alma, no será escuchado ni por el magistrado, ni por los circunstantes. Es un grito mudo. Y los desgraciados entre ellos son casi siempre también sordos, los unos para los otros. Y cada desgraciado, bajo la presión de la indiferencia general, trata, mediante la mentira o la inconsciencia, de hacerse sordo a sí mismo.

The great enigma of human life is not suffering but affliction.

No one in the Iliad is spared by it, as no one on earth is. No one who succumbs to it is by virtue of this fact regarded with contempt.

Il faut avoir eu par la joie la révélation de la réalité pour trouver la réalité dans la souffrance. Autrement la vie n'est qu'un rêve plus ou moins mauvais. Il faut parvenir à trouver une réalité plus pleine encore dans la souffrance qui est néant et vide. De même il faut aimer beaucoup la vie pour aimer encore davantage la mort.

Je ne dois pas aimer ma souffrance parce qu'elle est utile, mais parce qu'elle est.

As for us, we are nailed in place, free only to direct our gaze, subject to necessity. A blind mechanism, which takes no account of the degree of spiritual perfection, continually tosses people and throws some of them at the foot of the Cross. It depends only on them to keep—or not—their eyes turned towards God through the shaking. It is not that the providence of God is absent. It is by His providence that God willed necessity as a blind mechanism.

The irreducible character of suffering which makes it impossible for us not to have a horror of it at the moment when we are undergoing it is destined to bring the will to a standstill, just as absurdity brings the intelligence to a standstill, and absence love, so that man, having come to the end of his human faculties, may stretch out his arms, stop, look up and wait.

Si on trouve la plénitude de la joie dans la pensée que Dieu est, il faut trouver la même plénitude dans la connaissance que soi-même on n'est pas, car c'est la même pensée. Et cette connaissance n'est étendue à la sensibilité que par la souffrance et la mort.

In a matter of weeks, he had learned that without suffering and doubt, there can be no whole human being.

These were, on various unimportant charges, sent to jail or, later, to concentration camps—which were also jails, but the private jails of the M.M.'s, unshackled by any old-fashioned, nonsensical prison regulations.

Have men and women always got to hurt each other this way?' cried Ralph. 'Yes. Anybody that ain't content with being a peddler is going to hurt himself and everybody else, I guess,' said Joe.

As he watched her sleeping, under wretched and insufficient blankets, in the cold nights which swooped down after the panting sun-drenched days, his dry heart blossomed in tenderness. . . . To think that he had once esteemed people because they understood Goossens's music or James Joyce's fiction, because they wore sleek clothes and were clever at the use of forks, because they could set up wooden words as a barricade against roaring life!

At the moment our human world is based on the suffering and destruction of millions of non-humans. To perceive this and to do something to change it in personal and public ways is to undergo a change of perception akin to a religious conversion. Nothing can ever be seen in quite the same way again because once you have admitted the terror and pain of other species you will, unless you resist conversion, be always aware of the endless permutations of suffering that support our society.

I am killed them quick, but they are killing me slow. [Jim Browner in 'The Adventure of the Cardboard Box']

We all labor against our own cure, for death is the cure of all diseases

I saw the suffering and I let myself feel it… I saw the injustice and was compelled to do something about it. I changed from being a nun who only prayed for the suffering world to a woman with my sleeves rolled up, living my prayer.

Non dire felice uomo mortale, prima che abbia varcato il termine della vita senza aver patito dolore

ISMENE A chi vive tra le sofferenze il senno non rimane, signore, ma svanisce.»

CORO Avrà così sempre vigore oggi e in futuro, come l'aveva in passato, questa legge: mai grandezza ai mortali viene senza dolore.»

As Stephen Levine says: "When your fear touches someone's pain it becomes pity; when your love touches someone's pain, it becomes compassion."4

My sufferings I can compare to nothing else than the burning agonies of hell!

I had not then learned the measure of "man's inhumanity to man," nor to what limitless extent of wickedness he will go for the love of gain.

Alas! I had not then learned the measure of "man's inhumanity to man," nor to what limitless extent of wickedness he will go for the love of gain.

The existence of Slavery in its most cruel form among them, has a tendency to brutalize the humane and finer feelings of their nature. Daily witnesses of human suffering—listening to the agonizing screeches of the slave—beholding him writhing beneath the merciless lash—bitten and torn by dogs—dying without attention, and buried without shroud or coffin—it cannot otherwise be expected