Quotes About Suffering

To set their sufferings alongside the sufferings of another people was to compare them (which hell was worse?), demoting Sarajevo's martyrdom to a mere instance.

No we should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people's pain.

For the modern consciousness, the artist (replacing the saint) is the exemplary sufferer. And among artists, the writer, the man of words, is the person to whom we look to be able best to express his suffering.

In fact, there are many uses of the innumerable opportunities a modern life supplies for regarding - at a distance, through the medium of photography - other people's pain.

Photographs that depict suffering shouldn't be beautiful, as captions shouldn't moralize.

Making suffering loom larger, by globalizing it, may spur people to feel they ought to care more.

the war goes on—an ache in the bones, an ache in the gut, an ache in the heart.

It is felt that there is something morally wrong with the abstract of reality offered by photography; that one has no right to experience the suffering of others at a distance, denuded of its raw power; that we pay too high a human (or moral) price for those hitherto admired qualities of vision - the standing back from the aggressiveness of the world which frees us for observation and for elective attention.

El vasto catálogo fotográfico de la miseria y la injusticia en el mundo entero le ha dado a cada cual determinada familiaridad con lo atroz, volviendo más ordinario lo horrible, haciéndolo familiar.

And the cancer deaths of those harder to describe as losers, like Freud and Wittgenstein, have been diagnosed as the gruesome penalty exacted for a lifetime of instinctual renunciation. (Few remember that Rimbaud died of cancer.)

Perhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering of this extreme order are those who could do something to alleviate it - say, the surgeons at the military hospital where the photograph was taken - or those who could learn from it. The rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be.

Suffering was not the hallmark of seriousness; rather, seriousness was measured by one's ability to evade or transcend the penalty of suffering, by one's ability to achieve tranquillity and equilibrium.

For two thousand years, among Christians and Jews, it has been spiritually fashionable to be in pain.

it is not love which we overvalue, but suffering—more precisely, the spiritual merits and benefits of suffering.

For all the voyeuristic lure—and the possible satisfaction of knowing, This is not happening to me, I'm not ill, I'm not dying, I'm not trapped in a war—it seems normal for people to fend off thinking about the ordeals of others, even others with whom it would be easy to identify

And suicide is the third, ultimate use of suffering—conceived of not as an end to suffering, but as the ultimate way of acting on suffering.

So far as we feel sympathy, we feel we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering. Our sympathy proclaims our innocence as well as our impotence.

It is intolerable to have one's own sufferings twinned with anybody else's.

Images of the sufferings endured in war are so widely disseminated now that it is easy to forget how recently such images became what is expected from photographers of note.

Sufrir es una cosa; otra es convivir con las imágenes fotográficas del sufrimiento, que no necesariamente fortifican la conciencia ni la capacidad de compasión. También pueden corromperlas. Una vez que se han visto tales imágenes, se recorre la pendiente de ver más. Y más. Las imágenes pasman. Las imágenes anestesian.

No "we" should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people's pain.

Esto es lo que hace la guerra. Y aquello es lo que hace, también. La guerra rasga, desgarra. La guerra rompe, destripa. La guerra abrasa. La guerra desmembra. La guerra arruina.

It was strange: When you reduced even a fledgling love affair to its essentials - I loved her, she maybe loved me, I was foolish, I suffered - it became vacuous and trite, meaningless to anyone else. In the end, it's only the moments that we have, the kiss on the palm, the joint wonder at the furrowed texture of a fir trunk or at the infinitude of grains of sand in a dune. Only the moments.

It's well known by psychologists and anyone with a beating heart that the pain of losing something you're told is already yours is far greater than the pain of not getting something you wish for in the abstract.