Quotes About Suffering

To live your whole life in exile, that's horrible.

Viktor Frankl, a Jewish psychiatrist, survived a Nazi concentration camp to write Man's Search for Meaning,

Freedom goes with suffering. Truth, wisdom, and knowledge of reality go with suffering.

Love somehow goes with suffering.

The embedded journalists are talking about the suffering of the marines, who are so hot and are being fired on all the time.

The humiliation...I could have died there and I would have been happier.

Some anti-natalist positions are founded on either a dislike of children or on the interests of adults who have greater freedom and resources if they do not have and rear children. My anti-natalist view is different. It arises, not from a dislike of children, but instead from a concern to avoid the suffering of potential children and the adults they would become, even if not having those children runs counter to the interests of those who would have them.

Each one of us was harmed by being brought into existence. That harm is not negligible, because the quality of even the best lives is very bad—and considerably worse than most people recognize it to be. Although it is obviously too late to prevent our own existence, it is not too late to prevent the existence of future possible people.

Never to have been born is best But if we must see the light, the next best Is quickly returning whence we came. When youth departs, with all its follies, Who does not stagger under evils? Who escapes them? Sophocles' Sleep is good, death is better; but of course, The best would be never to have been born at all. Heinrich Heine2

We infrequently contemplate the harms that await any new-born child—pain, disappointment, anxiety, grief, and death. For any given child we cannot predict what form these harms will take or how severe they will be, but we can be sure that at least some of them will occur. None of this befalls the nonexistent. Only existers suffer harm.

It is not only the ratio of pleasure to pain that determines the quality of a life, but also the sheer quantity of pain. Once a certain threshold of pain is passed, no amount of pleasure can compensate for it.

On my view there is no net benefit to coming into existence and thus coming into existence is never worth its costs.

Life's big questions are big in the sense that they are momentuous. However, contrary to appearances, they are not big in the sense of being unanswerable. It is only that the answers are generally unpalatable. There is no great mystery, but there is plenty of horror.

Those who take their own lives, especially when the quality of those lives is much less bad than those of the cancer patient or the concentration camp prisoner, fly in the face of the normal will to live. They are seen as abnormal, not merely in the statistical sense of being unusual, but of being defective, either morally or psychologically.

Perhaps we would not be human if the quality of our lives were much better than it is. It does not follow that the quality of human life is good.

It is curious that while good people go to great lengths to spare their children from suffering, few of them seem to notice that the one (and only) guaranteed way to prevent all the suffering of their children is not to bring those children into existence in the first place

There is one kind of exception: those who believe that the world is too horrible a place into which to bring children. Such people believe that there happens to be too much bad in the world to make procreation acceptable. That belief must be right. I disagree only in one way with those who advance it. Unlike (most of) them, I think that there could be much less suffering and yet procreation would remain unacceptable.

There's such a thing as chronic pain, but there's no such thing as chronic pleasure. ... For an existing person, the presence of bad things is bad and the presence of good things is good. But compare that with a scenario in which that person never existed—then, the absence of the bad would be good, but the absence of the good wouldn't be bad, because there'd be nobody to be deprived of those good things.

We are born, we live, we suffer along the way, and then we die—obliterated for the rest of eternity. Our existence is but a blip in cosmic time and space.

One has to seek out pleasurable sensations, in the absence of which blandness comes naturally. The upshot of this is that we must continually work at keeping suffering (including tedium) at bay, and we can do so only imperfectly. Dissatisfaction does and must pervade life. There are moments, perhaps even periods, of satisfaction, but they occur against a background of dissatisfied striving.

Just as absent pleasures that do deprive are 'bad' in the sense of 'worse', so absent pleasures that do not deprive are 'not bad' in the sense of 'not worse'.

In a sentence: Life is bad, but so is death.

Life is so terrible, it would have been better not to have been born. Who is so lucky? Not one in a hundred thousand! Jewish saying

coming into existence, far from ever constituting a net benefit, always constitutes a net harm.