Quotes About Suffering

Love compels cruelty To those who do not understand love.

Who then devised the torment? Love.

The conscience of a blackened street Impatient to assume the world. I am moved by fancies that are curled Around these images, and cling: The notion of some infinitely gentle Infinitely suffering thing.

We are not here to triumph by fighting, by stratagem, or by resistance, Not to fight with beasts as men. We have fought the beast And have conquered. We have only to conquer Now, by suffering.

You are the consciousness of your unhappy family. Its bird sent flying through the purgatorial flame.

On his life between 1926-1927: like a bad Russian novel

but set down/This set down/This: were we led all that way for/ Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,/We had evidence and no doubt./I had seen birth and death,/But had thought they were different; this Birth was/Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.

why do we huddle together In a horrid amity of misfortune? why should we be implicated, brought in and brought together?

We must try to penetrate the other private worlds Of make-believe and fear. To rest in our own suffering Is evasion of suffering. We must learn to suffer more.

I am moved by fancies that are curled Around these images, and cling: The notion of some infinitely gentle Infinitely suffering thing. — T.S. Eliot, from "Preludes," Prufrock and Other Observations . (Forgotten Books September 27, 2015) Originally published 1917.

To be a 'ruined man' is itself a vocation.

You do not know what hope is, until you have lost it. You only know what it is not to hope: You do not know what it is to have hope taken from you, Or to fling it away, to join the legion of the hopeless Unrecognised by other men, though sometimes by each other.

Pain is the opposite of joy But joy is a kind of pain

Where does one go from a world of insanity? Somewhere on the other side of despair.

Experience came easily enough, learning how not to suffer would have proved much more practical.

He shouldn't have had to die. Nobody should have to die, Miriamele said slowly. Especially while they're still alive.

God shapes us with a hammer of pain on an anvil of duty. I cannot imagine what shape we will be when He is finished.

It's the same old story— 'Yes, it's too bad, but go suffer somewhere else. . . .

And that is why we do it, he decided. Because we hope it will bring us peace. But it never, never does.... Sludig

I . . . should have known . . . that my . . . torment was not yet finished, my guilt not forgiven.

That's right, Snowbébé. This world—it's cold and smelly.

Experiencing this first level of suffering is inevitable. But the second level of suffering comes when we reject the first level, or when we deprive ourselves of basic human needs like exercise and learning and friendship, or when we fail to seize the moment and appreciate all that we have.

Everyone was a victim of something.

It's harder to heal than it is to kill.