Quotes About Suffering

Sometimes I long to forget… It is painful to be conscious of two worlds.

Reading creates a sense of human fellowship. It is never (or rarely) a public activity, but in putting us in direct contact with other minds and sensibilities, it is a form of solitude which banishes loneliness. It can offer the consolation of knowing we are not alone, in our pleasures or in our suffering. It is in situations of deprivation that the value of reading – the deep need for books – becomes more vividly apparent.

They're a jolly lot, the lepers," said Father Liam. "People who've suffered don't have time to grumble.

El amor apasionado implica dolor y ese dolor no nos debe atormentar. En palabras de Franzen, "el dolor duele pero no mata. Si uno considera la alternativa —un sueño anestesiado de autosuficiencia que la tecnología ampara—, el dolor surge como producto e indicador natural del estar vivo en un mundo que resiste. Vivir una vida entera sin dolor es no haber vivido".

Positive psychologists insisted that people need to increase their happiness not only when things go wrong, but also when things go well, thus introducing a fundamentally new role to academic psychology: not only correcting suffering, but maximizing selfhood.

Every night I had nightmares. I dreamed of rats the size of cats, dead bodies, and needles stuck into me. After we found out that the Nazi's had made soup out of Jewish fat, I dreamed that soap bars spoke to me in the voices of my parents and sisters, asking me, "Why are you washing with us?

He was covered with whip marks, oozing blood. They had burned his fingernails and toenails with the flame of candles. It took him many days to recover.

Recuerdo la nocturna procesión de niños y más niños, tan asustados, tan callados, tan bonitos. Si pudiéramos ver tan solo a uno de ellos se nos partiría el alma. En cambio a los asesinos no se les partió el alma. Más duro, sin embargo, es haberlo vivido.

My father did a lot of disaster relief work, and he was always in places where there was a lot of pain.

One is guilty of all abjection that one does not help to relieve.

The final causes, then, of compassion are to prevent and to relieve misery.

There is no denying that the interventionist wars in Iraq and Libya that were propagated as necessary to relieve human suffering actually increased human suffering in those countries - many times over.

My grandparents were deeply affected by war, and it was obvious that the men who fought were horribly affected, as were the women who remained at home.

In life, loss is inevitable. Everyone knows this, yet in the core of most people it remains deeply denied - 'This should not happen to me.' It is for this reason that loss is the most difficult challenge one has to face as a human being.

Death, the real simile for disease - for when we are ill, do we not always feel like we are dying, even if it's only a little? - remains, despite our secularism, the most metaphoricised phenomenon of all.

You will remember me as a little child in another time, during another war, and involving another airplane.

Let us remind ourselves that if we are to be our Lord's disciples, we must take up his Cross and follow him.

Love is one of the only reminders besides pain that things are real. It's one of the only things worth fighting for.

Renunciation - that is the great fact we all, individuals and classes, have to learn. In trying to avoid it we bring misery to ourselves and others.

You know, we think about addiction as a morally reprehensible choice, but addicts act crazy because, in a way, that they are.

I think if 'The Narrow Road To The Deep North' is one of the high points of Japanese culture, then the experience of my father, who was a slave laborer on the Death Railway, represents one of its low points.

Haitians don't like to say they are hungry because we are proud.

When people are hungry, when a mother or father is facing a child that they can't feed, you can't ask that family to lay down their arms.

Too many children and adults go hungry every day.