Quotes About Suffering

Tehran looked the way most of its remaining citizens must have felt: sad, forlorn, and defenseless, yet not without a certain dignity. The adhesive tape pasted on the window-panes to prevent the implosion of shattered glass told the story of its suffering, a suffering made more poignant because of its newly recovered beauty, the fresh green of trees, washed by spring showers, the blossoms and the rising snowcapped mountains now so near, as if pasted across the sky.

and suffering is another bad habit," as Bellow had said in Herzog.

There were many such instances, when expressions of sympathy could not be exchanged. What do you say to someone who is telling you about the rape and murder of virgins—I'm sorry, I feel your pain?

God sees the world through the eyes of those most oppressed.

As a country, we seem to be suffering from an empathy deficit.

It's not a question we ask ourselves enough, I think; as a country, we seem to be suffering from an empathy deficit. We wouldn't tolerate schools that don't teach, that are chronically underfunded and understaffed and underinspired, if we thought that the children in them were like our children. I believe a stronger sense of empathy would tilt the balance of our current politics in favor of those who are struggling. If we fail to help, we diminish ourselves.

They didn't seem concerned by the fact that for every "loser" who had bought more house than he could afford, there were twenty folks who had lived within their means but were now suffering the fallout from Wall Street's bad bets.

I couldn't help but think about the daily fighting that continued to consume Iraq and Afghanistan and all the cruelty and suffering and injustice that my administration had barely even begun to deal with. The idea that I, or any one person, could bring order to such chaos seemed laughable; on some level, the crowds below were cheering an illusion.

I believed there was an essential bond between the Black and the Jewish experiences—a common story of exile and suffering that might ultimately be redeemed by a shared thirst for justice, a deeper compassion for others, a heightened sense of community

War is not nice.

It is not our difficulties or our suffering alone that makes us wise. It is what we add to them--patience, perseverance, compassion, courage, love. From this combination, our priceless pearls of wisdom grow.

The truly sinister possibility is that for many of us, all the little measures we take to remain fit—all the deprivations and exertions—will only lead to a longer chance to live with crippling and humiliating disabilities.

Other people can be annoying, as Sartre famously suggested, but true hell is perpetual imprisonment in the self.

If a man's been beat, and his woman's been raped, by any man, white or black or purple, you think that man's going to see God's face the way the man who wronged him tells him it is? God finds all sorts of ways to speak to those that need Him, Ben. He's a man with a sword, to those that need a rod and staff to comfort them, whether that man's called Ogu or St. James. He's the man with the keys in his hand to those that're in chains and seeking a way through the door to heaven.

Pain cannot be avoided, and experience with pain is the greatest source of self-knowledge we have.

Hunger of the body is altogether different from the shallow, daily hunger of the belly. Those who have known this kind of hunger cannot entirely love, ever again, those who have not.

You know things are bad when a woman without any legs and who recently lost two of her own kids feels sorry for you.

It's monstrous, what one person will do to another.

Live long enough, and all things you ever loved can turn around to scorch you blind. The wonder is that you could start life with nothing, end with nothing, and lose so much in between.

She looked like Cinderella in reverse, stepped out from her life at the ball for a day of misery among the ashes.

I have long relied on the comforts of martyrdom.

What we suffered in our lives we went through together, but somehow we came out different doors, on different ground levels.

OxyContin, God's gift for the laid-off deep-hole man with his back and neck bones grinding like bags of gravel. For the bent-over lady pulling double shifts at Dollar General with her shot knees and ADHD grandkids to raise by herself.

There is no point in treating a depressed person as though she were just feeling sad, saying, There now, hang on, you'll get over it. Sadness is more or less like a head cold—with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer. Cynthia