Quotes About Suffering

The Trappist monk Thomas Keating once said, "The cross Jesus asked you to carry is yourself. It's all the pain inflicted on you in your past and all the pain you've inflicted on others.

The Wounded Healer deduz que graça e cura são transmitidas por meio da vulnerabilidade de homens e mulheres que foram maltratados e desprezados pela vida. Apenas soldados feridos podem servir ao Amor.

Humility and fraternal love are spiritual bedfellows. When we befriend our own brokenness and minister to our wounds with tenderness and compassion, the "other" is no longer an intruder but a fellow sufferer.

Suffering creates a vivid contrast illuminating joy, happiness, and satisfaction. It is a harsh lesson on the other side of sublime. We all must suffer, whether we choose to or not. There must be value in that which is given in our lives, even though we hope and try to live joyfully and enjoy our brief time on earth.

Suffering can precipitate creativity, liberating the creator through inspiration and then many available channels of human communication, and therefore there is value in suffering.

I felt great empathy for my friend, as one form of cancer after another emerged to challenge him. I felt sympathy for his suffering that surely clawed at his daily routines, always active and busy, but he rarely verbalized complaints while courageously challenging his archenemy. He met pain and physical decline with 600-calorie workouts; he discarded anxieties somewhere along innumerable running trails; he faced death by running through life at full stride.

Really, once the worst happens, it's always happening. It's never not happening.

It strikes me profoundly that the world is more often than not a bad and cruel place.

Abandon all hope, ye who enter here." According to Dante, these lines are written over the gates of Hell. Zen masters, by contrast, have high hopes for going to Hell. For them, out of bottomless compassion, we should want to go to Hell. When asked by a college student in America if he thought people go to Heaven after they die, the modern Rinzai Zen master Fukushima Keid? replied: "Only the ego wants to go to Heaven!

Zen meditation is meant to bring an end to the delusory and destructive ego, not to serve it as a means for achieving its ends.

People like me who have never suffered—I mean in the way the people of Korytów and all the other millions of Poles are suffering—can afford to be broad-minded. You and the people who have really suffered must think people like me are not only smug, but callous." "Only if you tell us that it is wrong to hate

I guess when you're not awake, you're not awake. Waking up to the suffering of people who are different from us is a long process, and has a whole lot to do with what community we belong to and whose consciousness and life experiences impact our own on a daily basis. I have a hunch I'm going to be waking up until the moment I die.

Estrella realized words could become as excruciating as rusted nails piercing the heels of her bare feet.

We all have things, Bast. We carry them, they weigh us down and sometimes they suck us under. The goal is to know when to drop and when to reach for a hand.

A person can carry his own persecutor, his own prison, about with him, Monseigneur. He can - as you know - die of thirst even when he has the clearest water within his reach. To be free...not to be free...it is all relative. No one has to drag along more ballast than he wants to and he who allows himself to be bound is a fool. The biggest fools are those who wear shackles of cobwebs and believe themselves to be helpless.

The soul suffers from nothing more than from not being understood. This is, though, its fate elicited by its own nature.

If there were God, never would He have permitted what I have seen with my own eyes

Wherever battles are waged there are casualties, and death is a common occurrence. But what is closest to our hearts is the best interest of the people and the suffering of the vast majority, and when we die for the people, it is an honorable death. Nevertheless we should do our best to avoid unnecessary casualties. Mao Zedong, 1944

Si se diera el caso de un dolor insoportable que no se pudiera paliar, podría pedir que me sedaran. Así abandonaría durmiendo esta vida y este mundo. Prefiero eso que tener que suicidarme. Es algo que no quiero hacer, por mis seres queridos. Si estuviera solo en la vida, podría ser una opción, pero hoy por hoy no lo es.

El hecho de que hayamos desarrollado la capacidad intelectual guarda relación, lógicamente, con la supervivencia. En último término, lo único que queremos es sobrevivir. Queremos vivir, no morir. Cada vez que veo a una persona rebuscando en los contenedores de basura veo ante mí ese sencillo axioma: queremos vivir. A cualquier precio.

La barbarie ha sempre dei connotati umani, pensò. È questo che rende la barbarie così disumana. L'aveva letto da qualche parte.

quand le monde offre tant de motifs de joie, souffrir est le fait d'un imbécile

The soft yellow-brown of the son's underclothes looks beautiful when seen in rich harmony with the red of the father's cloak, but the truth of the matter is that the son is dressed in rags that betray the great misery that lies behind him. In the context of a compassionate embrace, our brokenness may appear beautiful, but our brokenness has no other beauty but the beauty that comes from the compassion that surrounds it.

Who can listen to a story of loneliness and despair without taking the risk of experiencing similar pains in his own heart and even losing his precious peace of mind? In short: "Who can take away suffering without entering it?