Quotes About Suffering

Purgatory is hell with hope.

I never felt like that before. Maybe it could be depression, like you get. I can understand how you suffer now when you're depressed; I always thought you liked it and I thought you could have snapped yourself out any time, if not alone then by means of the mood organ. But when you get that depressed you don't care. Apathy, because you've lost a sense of worth. It doesn't matter whether you feel better because you have no worth.

How did it ever get to be that bad? I think something happened to Germany after the Great War. You could see it on the streets of Berlin. A callous indifference to human suffering.

But in my wretched efforts to stay alive at almost any cost I could still hurt and be hurt in my turn, and as long as death's black barrel organ was playing it seemed I would have to dance to the cheerless, doom-filled tune that was turning inexorably on the drum, like some liveried monkey with a terrified rictus on its face and a tin cup in its hand. That didn't make me unusual; just German.

No wonder Van Gogh cut his ear off, I thought; there's nothing else to do in a place like this but cut your ear off.

Es un silencio nacido de la vergüenza, porque incluso los inocentes son culpables. Despojado de todo derecho humano, el hombre vuelve a convertirse en un animal.

Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, And don't have any kids yourself.

I would not dare Console you if I could. What can be said, Except that suffering is exact, but where Desire takes charge, readings will grow erratic?

Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Reason cannot save us, nothing can; but reason can mitigate the cruelty of living.

But who is set up for the impossible that is going to happen? Who is set up for tragedy and the incomprehensibility of suffering? Nobody. The tragedy of the man not set up for tragedy—that is every man's tragedy.

Paul was the only scholar among the apostles. He never displays his learning, considering it of no account as compared with the excellency of the knowledge of Christ, for whom he suffered the loss of all things, but he could not conceal it, and turned it to the best use after his conversion. Peter and John had natural genius, but no scholastic education; Paul had both, and thus became the founder of Christian theology and philosophy.

Again, one man loses by death a much-loved1359 son; another has a reprobate son alive; both equally to be pitied, though the one mourns over the death, the other over the life, of his boy.

his youngest child, a four-year-old girl whom he adored, had suddenly fallen ill and lay dying.

Desire, desire! I have too dearly bought, With price of mangled mind, thy worthless ware.

Power, no matter how well-intentioned, tends to cause suffering. Love, being vulnerable, absorbs it. In a point of convergence on a hill called Calvary, God renounced the one for the sake of the other.

We tend to think, 'Life should be fair because God is fair.' But God is not life. And if I confuse God with the physical reality of life- by expecting constant good health for example- then I set myself up for crashing disappointment.

Endurance is not just the ability to bear a hard thing, but to turn it into glory.

The unavoidable harshness of life surprised none of them, for they were Christians one and all, believing that they inhabited a fallen world, albeit one filled with God's grace.

This feeling of love, it transports me, it makes me happy. At the same time, it consumes me and makes me miserable, the way all impossible loves are miserable.

A million questions flash through my mind: How did it begin for him? How and at what age did it reveal itself? How is it that no one can see it on him? Yes, how can it be so undetectable? And then: Is it about suffering? Only suffering? And again: Will I be the first? Or were there others before me? Others who were also secret? And: What does he imagine exactly? I don't ask any of these questions, of course. I follow his lead, accepting the rules of the game. He says: I know a place.

Living by her side was like living in a fairy tale because she had these moments of pure poetry—she invented whole worlds. He tells me that eventually she was placed in a specialized institution, that in the end his father resigned himself to it: the death of his soul. She is still there.

And when you've been hurt once, you're afraid to try again later, in dread of enduring the same pain. You avoid getting hurt in an attempt to avoid suffering: for years, this principle will serve as my holy sacrament. So many lost years.)

Il faudrait avoir des regrets. Croire que j'aurais mieux fait de me rebeller, mais non, je n'y arrive pas. Si c'était à refaire, je ne changerais rien. Avec toi, quelle qu'aurait été la manière, je n'aurais pu échapper à la souffrance, à la pureté éclatante de la souffrance.