Quotes About Suffering

Almost every day I can feel myself suffering mainly in the head, I can explain the pain to myself but knowing it comes from an inflammation of my imagination doesn't prevent it being reality itself. What's more I'd be crazy not to go crazy. We don't know what an illness is. On awful hurts we plaster little old words, as if we could think hell with a paper bandage.

Den lille havfrue måtte tænke på den første gang hun dykkede op af havet og så den samme pragt og glæde, og hun hvirvlede sig med i dansen, svævede, som svalen svæver når den forfølges, og alle tiljublede hende beundring, aldrig havde hun danset så herligt; det skar som skarpe knive i de fine fødder, men hun følte det ikke; det skar hende smerteligere i hjertet.

I have seen something of the horrors of war, and much too much of the worse horrors of peace.

What lay at the bottom of their savagery, of course, was their idiotic belief in Calvinism—beyond question the most brutal and barbaric theology ever subscribed to by mortal man, whether in or out of the African bush.

No death, no doom, no anguish can arouse the surpassing despair which flows from a loss of identity. - Through the Gates of the Silver Key

I am writing this under an appreciable mental strain, since by tonight I shall be no more. Penniless, and at the end of my supply of the drug which alone makes life endurable, I can bear the torture no longer; and shall cast myself from this garret window into the squalid street below.

Wherefore do ye toil; is it not that ye may live and be happy? And if ye toil only that ye may toil more, when shall happiness find you? Ye toil to live, but is not life made of beauty and song? And if ye suffer no singers among you, where shall be the fruits of your toil? Toil without song is like a weary journey without an end. Were not death more pleasing?

Scrivo in uno stato di tensione insostenibile. Fra poco sarà l'alba e, allora, io non esisterò più. Privo d'ogni mezzo, privo della droga che — sola — mi ha consentito fino ad oggi di sopravvivere ai miei incubi, non mi rimane altro modo per sottrarmi al tormento: mi getterò dall'alta finestra di questa soffitta, nella squallida strada sottostante.

we are dulled and prosaic with the poison of life.

My youngest boy went mad. He sits drooling on the porch, trying to play the cat like an accordion. He's been scratched some.

If heaven is merciful, it will some day efface from my consciousness the sight that I saw, and let me live my last years in peace.

He let the boy run about for a week until he began stumbling and hurting himself, and then he shut him in an attic room across the hall from his mother's. The way they screamed at each other from behind their locked doors was very terrible, especially to little Merwin, who fancied they talked in some terrible language that was not of earth.

His drinking, of course, only aggravated what it was meant to alleviate.

Why do people have to live like animals, eating and reproducing, possessed by the instinct for survival? What point is there in having a dozen sons if your own life is miserable and senseless?

Holiness without love is not God's kind of holiness. And love without holiness is not God's kind of love. Our prophetic priestly function of speaking to God's people requires us to identify with the people, to have a passion for their salvation, and to have a compassion that will cause us even to suffer for their sake.

She was like defenceless Nature, that withers in the blast because it has shelter neither of God nor of men; human beings do not give one another shelter; and God? We shall see, when in the end we are dead of consumption. Perhaps the Almighty had made a note of all that she had had to suffer. All the same she felt that evening that she was not too old once more to view the future in a dream; in a new dream. To be able to look forward is to live.

He wept only as children weep when they suffer injustice at the hands of those stronger than themselves. It is the most bitter weeping in the world. That was what happened to his [only] book; it was taken from him and burned. And he was left standing naked and without a book on the first day of summer.

Why should those of whom one is fondest have to suffer the most, and why is it that one can never do anything for them?

These men suffered enough for a hundred lifetimes, and no one in this country should be allowed to forget it.

If you take a handful of salt and pour it into a small bowl of water, the water in the bowl will be too salty to drink. But if you pour the same amount of salt into a large river, people will still be able to drink the river's water. If your heart is small, one unjust word or act will make you suffer. But if your heart is large, if you have understanding and compassion, that word or deed will not have the power to make you suffer.

Suffering is not objective. It depends largely on the way you perceive. There are things that cause you to suffer but do not cause others to suffer. There are things that bring you joy but do not bring others joy.

Getting rid of the concept of self is the work of all meditators, because suffering is born from this concept.

For Mum, life was fundamentally hell. You went blind, you got raped, people forgot your birthday, Nixon got elected, your husband fled with a blonde from Beckenham, and then you got old, you couldn't walk and you died.

How many artists have created while drunk, high on laudanum, opium, chloral or amphetamines? What have antidepressants ever done for culture?