Quotes About Suffering

What woe is lacking to my tale of woes?

Commit cruelty on a person long enough and the mind begins to go.

I have seen or heard of no other man whom destiny treated with such enmity as it did Philoktetes

I know that you are deathly sick; and yet, sick as you are, not one is as sick as I.

Comply, and fear not, for my load of woe Is incommunicable to all but me.

Good advice, if there's any good in suffering. Quickest is best when trouble blocks the way.

They see you and me: they know my pain's a fact, my revenge is empty breath.

Look and learn all citizens of Thebes. This is Oedipus. He, who read the famous riddle, and we hailed chief of men, All envied his power, glory, and good fortune. Now upon his head the sea of disaster crashes down. Mortality is man's burden. Keep your eyes fixed on your last day. Call no man happy until he reaches it, and finds rest from suffering.

Keep your eyes on that last days, on your dying. Happiness and peace, they were not yours unless at death you can look back on your life and say I lived, I did not suffer.

Wise words; but O, when wisdom brings no profit, To be wise is to suffer.

To look on self-wrought woes, when no other has had a hand in them- this lays sharp pangs to the soul.

The pains we inflict upon ourselves hurt most of all.

OEDIPUS: O, O, O, they will all come, all come out clearly! Light of the sun, let me look upon you no more after today! I who first saw the light bred of a match accursed, and accursed in my living with them I lived with, cursed in my killing.

Invited, not inflicted; of all wounds, those that seem willful are the worst to bear.

Mother and father marked out that rock to be my everlasting tomb—buried alive. Let me die there, where they tried to kill me.

That all our gathered spoil was reaved and slaughtered, Flocks, herds, and herdmen, by some human hand

Never bring them down to the level of my pains.

Banish the man, or pay back blood with blood. Murder sets the plague-storm on the city.

To never have been born may be the greatest boon of all.

Blind, lost in the night, endless night that nursed you!

you'll pay in tears, I promise you, for this, this witch-hunt.

All unknowing you are the scourge of your own flesh and blood, the dead below the earth and the living here above, and the double lash of your mother and your father's curse will whip you from this land one day, their footfall treading you down in terror, darkness shrouding your eyes that now can see the light!

How, how could the furrows your father plowed bear you, your agony, harrowing on in silence O so long?

Acceptance—that is the great lesson suffering teaches