Quotes About Suffering

My mission Is to suffer for all those who suffer without knowing it. I must pay for them, expiate their unconsciousness, their luck to be ignorant of how unhappy they are.

A foretold misfortune, when at last it occurs, is ten, is a hundred times harder to endure than one we did not expect. All during our apprehensions, we lived through it in advance, and when it happens these past torments are added to the present ones, and together they form a mass whose weight is intolerable.

When someone complains that his life has come to nothing, we need merely remind him that life itself is in an analogous situation, if not worse.

We have lost, being born, as much as we shall lose, dying. Everything.

The appetite for torment is for some what the lure of gain is for others.

We pursue whatever we pursue out of torment -- a need for torment. Our very quest for salvation is a torment, the subtlest, the best camouflaged of all.

Since we remember clearly only our ordeals, it is ultimately the sick, the persecuted, the victims in every realm who will have lived to the best advantage. The others - the lucky ones - have a life, of course, but not the memory of life.

Life is the privilege of mediocre people. Only mediocrities live at life's normal temperature; the others are consumed at temperatures at which life cannot endure, at which they can barely breathe, already one foot beyond life.

This world can take everything from us, can forbid us everything, but no one has the power to keep us from wiping ourselves out.

My greed for agonies has made me die so many times that it strikes me as indecent to keep on abusing a corpse from which I can get nothing more.

If you are doomed to devour yourself, nothing can keep you from it: a trifle will impel you as much as a tragedy. Resign yourself to erosion at all times: your fate wills it so.

Todas as nossas humilhações provêm de que não podemos resolver-nos a morrer de fome. Pagamos caro esta covardia. Viver em função dos homens, sem vocação de mendigo! Rebaixar-se ante esses macacos engravatados, sortudos, enfatuados! Estar à mercê dessas caricaturas indignas até de desprezo!

Everything which borders on torment wakens the psychologist in each of us

My mission is to suffer for all those who suffer without knowing it. I must pay for them, expiate their unconscious, their luck to be ignorant of how unhappy they are.

De la vida tenemos que hacer un soneto —o ahorcarnos.

Not to haw been born, merely musing on that-what happiness, what freedom, what space!

To suffer: sole modality of acquiring the sensation of existence; to exist: unique means of safeguarding our destruction.

Have you suffered for knowledge?

I seriously ask myself, What is the meaning of all this? Why raise questions, throw lights, or see shadows? Wouldn't it be better if I buried my tears in the sand on a seashore in utter solitude? But I never cried, because my tears have always turned into thoughts. And my thoughts are as bitter as tears.

Nobody is comforted in his sufferings by the thought we are all mortals, nor does anybody who suffers really find comfort in the past or present suffering of others.

If I have been able to hold out till now, it is because each blow, which seemed intolerable at the time, was followed by a second which was worse

If we did not bear the stigmata of life, how easy it would be to steal away, and how well everything would go by itself!

Each of us takes on himself that unit of disaster which is the phenomenon man. And the only meaning time has is to multiply these units, endlessly to enlarge these vertical sufferings which depend upon a nonentity of matter, upon the pride of a given name, and upon a solitude without appeal.

Life is not, and death is a dream. Suffering has invented them both as self-justification. Man alone is torn between an unreality and an illusion. — Emil M. Cioran, Tears and Saints . (University Of Chicago Press; Reprint edition July 6, 1998) Originally published 1937.