Quotes About Suffering

But Ignatian spirituality is so capacious that even an introduction will touch upon a broad spectrum of topics: making good choices, finding meaningful work, being a good friend, living simply, wondering about suffering, deepening your prayer, striving to be a better person, and learning to love.

Meanwhile, pipe down, there are people trying to die in here.

And you thought: they're used to it. But that was how those who suffered less always thought about those who suffered more, that they were used to it, that they no longer felt it as you did. Nobody ever got used to it. All they learned to do was to stop letting it show.

bear their crosses. They pick up these crosses to overcome suffering. They actively seek to end suffering and violence

It may appear that the prizes for winning are indispensable, that without them life is meaningless, perhaps even impossible. There are, to be sure, games in which the stakes seem to be life and death. In slavery, for example, or severe political oppression, the refusal to play the demanded role may be paid for with terrible suffering or death.

I feel like, like pudding," Iggy groaned. "Pudding with nerve endings. Pudding in great pain.

Maybe that's all she saw, the end of her suffering, the black, blank silence of the departed. No more bells, no more noises, no more voices and their terrible, disapproving faces. No past, no future, no more sad todays. No tomorrows.

For imagine having somebody beside you day and night loving you and forgiving you and petting you forever and ever, that must be a better description of hell than being put into a boiling lake or cauldron of ice that burnt your black.

Suffering perfects the soul.

Those who help the poor the most hurt them the most.

JAMES 1:2-4 My brethren, count it all joy when ye fall into divers temptations; knowing this, that the trying of your faith worketh patience. But let patience have her perfect work, that ye may be perfect and entire, wanting nothing.

And once Genghis Khan breached those walls, he did as he had promised. He killed everyone in the city, over a hundred thousand people. But he didn't stop there. It is said he slaughtered every beast of the field, too. It was those dark acts that earned the city the name it bears today." The professor shuddered. "Shahr-e-Gholghola. The City of Screams.

I remember the Inquisition, when pain in service to the church was raised to an art form.

The space between the next two buildings was crowded with four torn bodies, limbs shredded from torsos, intestines strewn like party streamers. Suddenly one of the torsos jerked into the darkened alley beyond, dragged by something hidden in shadow.

I am bound upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears do scald like molten lead

I am a man more sinned against than sinning" (Lear, 9.60).

Death was easy. A piece of pie. That is the true horror.

Be at peace all of you, for hunger has a whip, and he will drive the strange away in the night.

The true Christian reaction to suffering and sorrow is not the attitude of self-pity, fatalism or resentment; it is the spirit which takes life's difficulties as a God given opportunity, and regards its troubles as a sacred trust, and wears the thorns as a crown.

So many places it could be,' Ramaas replied. He was moving closer. 'Paris. London. Rome. Berlin. All the rest. I wish God had given me enough weapons to strike them all. But I will be satisfied with what I have. A city full of thieves will be burned to ashes and all who gave them succor will suffer for it.

Cruel as death, and hungry as the grave.

Do you remember my friend Fumiko Kobayashi? She loaned me a book by a university professor named Taki Sugiyama Lebra, Japanese Patterns of Behaviour, and she writes that death, particularly voluntary death, is surrounded in this country by a heroic, romantic, aesthetic and emotional aura. She says we often find it hard to communicate and use suicide to make our ideas, or beliefs, or sufferings known. I don't know whether I believe that or not.

El amor es un maestro cruel y terrible. Uno pierde su yo en favor del otro, pero al hacerlo se esclaviza y se convierte en un desdichado.

It can never have understood why it was forced to live in such misery: bewildered by noise (as I imagine), distressed by smoke, barking dogs, cooking smells, teased by drunkards and children, tethered to fly on the shortest of chains. Yet even a child can see its dignity: thimble of bravery, all fluff and brittle bone. Not timid, not even hopeless, but steady and holding its place. Refusing to pull back from the world.