Quotes About Suffering

His life was a suicide. He gave up his soul for fear, little by little, until there was nowhere left in the universe but hell.

Factory farming isn't just killing: It is a negation, a complete denial of the animal as a living being with his or her own needs and nature ... It confronts us with the animal equivalent of Abraham Lincoln's condemnation of human slavery: 'If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.

Now what is it that moves our very hearts and sickens us so much at cruelty shown to poor brutes? … They have done us no harm and they have no power of resistance; it is the cowardice and tyranny of which they are the victims which make their sufferings so especially touching. Cruelty to animals is as if man did not love God…. There is something so very dreadful, so Satanic, in tormenting those who have never harmed us, who cannot defend themselves, who are utterly in our power.21

A helpless elephant hunted by sharpshooters waiting by the water hall, a deer fleeing the hunter or dying on a highway, a pig or lamb or calf trapped amid the bedlam, - they cannot draw a meaning from their hardship, or find refuge in God, or pray for deliverance. That still leaves the enduring of it, the deprivation and fear and panic and loneliness. We know those feelings too.

For here we have the livestock industry and its best minds admitting that the production units suffer. They now concede, in theory and practice, that the animals are feeling pain, and not just physical pain either but emotional torment.

Gratuitous cruelty cannot take cover behind the fact of inevitable suffering.

When people say, for example, that they like their veal or hot dogs just too much to ever give them up, and yeah it's sad about the farms but that's just the way it is, reason hears in that the voice of gluttony. We can say that here what makes a human being human is precisely the ability to understand that the suffering of an animal is more important than the taste of a treat.

We may not know or agree upon moral truths. But we do know that opposite things cannot at the same time ne true: identical creatures at the same time capable of suffering and incapable of suffering, worthy of moral consideration and unworthy of such concern, within the reach of God's love and beneath it.

When we call something a necessary evil, something requiring the suffering or death of a fellow creature, the evil is real and it had better be necessary.

All predators are limited in the kind and duration of suffering they can inflict and in the level of moral degradation of which they are capable. We are not.

My brand of conservatism also brings with it a basic realism, accepting that there is a certain amount of suffering in the world beyond our power to avoid or spare, especially in the case of animals.

We may not know or agree upon moral truths. But we do know that opposite things cannot at the same time be true: identical creatures at the same time capable of suffering and incapable of suffering, worthy of moral consideration and unworthy of such concern, within the reach of God's love and beneath it.

For all we know it, their pain may sometimes seem more immediate, blunt, arbitrary, and inescapable than ours. Walk through an animal shelter or a slaughterhouse and you wonder if animal suffering might not at times be all the more terrifying and all-encompassing without benefit of the words and concepts that for us, after all, confer not only meaning but consolation. Whatever is going on inside their heads, it doesn't seem mere to them.

The very industries clinging to such theories employ cats and dogs and chimps and so many other animals in laboratory test of analgesics and surgeries, a useless exercise unless they experience physical pain comparable to ours.

Still the most intense pleasure's but a splinter of ice on the gallons of lava that gush from my cracked heart.

The most striking quality that humans and animals have in common is the capacity to experience suffering.

How can we choose to continue Playing this deadly And impersonal game of loss?

That affair with Tony helped my writing," she told Tacy. "I mean, it will when I get around to write. It's good for writers to suffer." Tony dropped in often, teasing and affectionate as ever, and quite unaware of having improved her art.

During the Great Depression, the philosophy of grin-and-bear-it became a national coping mechanism.

Sometimes it is worth any amount of suffering just to prevent giving your parents the opportunity to be right.

The regret and humiliation hurt much more than the cold.

When something horrific happens, you sort of feel like you have to stay? Until justice is done. Which it never was.

Such would have been our life, had we not committed our crime which changed all things for us. And it was our curse which drove us to our crime.

The faces stood out, separate, lonely, no two alike. Behind each, there were the years of a life lived or half over, effort, hope and an attempt, honest or dishonest, but an attempt. It had left on all a single mark in common: on lips smiling with malice, on lips loose with renunciation, on lips tight with uncertain dignity—on all—the mark of suffering.