Quotes About Suffering

I do not think that tragedy is our natural fate and I do not live in chronic dread of disaster. It is no happiness, but suffering that I consider unnatural. It is not success, but calamity that I regard as the abnormal exception in Human Life.

John Galt is Prometheus who changed his mind. After centuries of being torn by vultures in payment for having brought to men the fire of the gods, he broke his chains—and he withdrew his fire—until the day when men withdraw their vultures.

People, he thought, were as hungry for a sight of joy as he had always been--for a moment's relief from that gray load of suffering which seemed so inexplicable and unnecessary. He had never been able to understand why men should be unhappy.

It's good to suffer. Dont complain. Bear, bow, accept - and be grateful that God has made you suffer. For this makes you better than the people who are laughing and happy.

When one acts on pity against justice, it is the good whom one punishes for the sake of the evil; when one saves the guilty from suffering, it is the innocent whom one forces to suffer. There is no escape from justice, nothing can be unearned and unpaid for in the universe, neither in matter nor in spirit—and if the guilty do not pay, then the innocent have to pay it.

You are damned, and we wish to share your damnation.

It goes only down to a certain point and then it stops. As long as there is that untouched point, it's not really pain.

My dearest one, it is not proper for men to be without names. There was a time when each man had a name of his own to distinguish him from all other men. So let us choose our names. I have read of a man who lived many thousands of years ago, and of all the names in these books, his is the one I wish to bear. He took the light of the gods and brought it to men, and he taught men to be gods. And he suffered for his deed as all bearers of light must suffer. His name is Prometheus.

I'm not capable of suffering completely. I never have. It goes only down to a certain point and then it stops. As long as there is that untouched point, it's not really pain.

She survived it. She was able to survive it, because she did not believe in suffering. She faced with astonished indignation the ugly fact of feeling pain, and refused to let it matter. Suffering was a senseless accident, it was not part of life as she saw it.

There is no necessity for pain-why, then, is the worst pain reserved for those who will not accept its necessity?

The only guilt of the victims, he thought, had been that they accepted it as guilt.

It's not that I don't suffer, it's that I know the unimportance of suffering, I know that pain is to be fought and thrown aside, not to be accepted as part of one's soul and as a permanent scar across one's view of existence.

She saw both serenity and suffering in the calm of his face, an expression like a smile of pain, though he was not smiling...He did not look like a man bearing torture now, but like a man who sees that which makes the torture worth bearing.

We do not hold the belief that this earth is a realm of misery where man is doomed to destruction. We do not think that tragedy is our natural fate and we do not live in chronic dread of disaster. We do not expect disaster until we have a specific reason to expect it - and when we encounter it, we are free to fight it. It is not happiness, but suffering that we consider unnatural. It is not success, but calamity that we regard as the abnormal exception in human life.

La última gran hambruna que había conocido Rusia, en 1891, aproximadamente en las mismas regiones (el Volga medio y bajo y una parte de Kazajstán), había causado de cuatrocientas a quinientas mil víctimas.

The stranger acted no differently from the fortune-teller who intuits that you have recently suffered a setback; she is unfailingly correct. Witchcraft merely supplied the culprit, sometimes in advance of her crime, often many years later.

John Willard's widow, who had cowered under the stairs after his beatings, married a Towne in 1694.

From strawberries under torture one may extract all sorts of things.

Allora ho capito che, qualunque cosa io faccia, sarà lo stesso; voglia o non voglia per te dev'essere una tortura. Forse qualcosa di peggio, poiché gli strumenti di tortura sono passivi e innocenti, come le pietre che possono cadere e ammazzare. Ma uno strumento di tortura che ti ama e che vuole il tuo bene... Veramente non posso immaginarmelo.

To torture a man you have to know his pleasures.

No, Trurl, a sufferer is not one who hands you his suffering, that you may touch it, weigh it, bite it like a coin; a sufferer is one who behaves like a sufferer!

Oh, miseria de la existencia humana que oscila eternamente entre la escasez y el exceso!».

Because all books ARE the Book of Job -- man in the crucible like Jack in the Box....