Quotes About Suffering

For four to six months at a time, I would barely eat. I lived on a diet of Melba toast, carrots, and black coffee.

The text's construction of an ailment as the product of a conflict with supernatural beings...renarrates the suffer's experience in martial and heroic terms. If recited to victims of the illness, the charm had the potential to help them renegotiate their self-perception.

there were certain chapters when I stopped writing, saw the domestic situation I was in and thought, "I don't want to face this world, let's get back to the hellish one I'm imagining.

I clenched my teeth and fists to stop them biting and scratching these clever men who want no care for the helpless sick small, who use religions and politics to stay comfortably superior to all that pain: who make religions and politics, excuses to spread misery with fire and sword and how could I stop all this? I did not know what to do.

Plato in both the Gorgias and the Republic looked back to Socrates and asserted that "it is better to suffer tortures on the rack than to have a soul burdened with the guilt of doing evil." Aristotle does not confront this position directly: he merely emphasizes that it is better still both to be free from having done evil and to be free from being tortured on the rack.

Gravity ruled, and gravity did not take into account circumstances, or the unfairness of things, or listen to eleventh-hour petitions before reluctantly repealing its laws. Gravity crushed

This one could turn her back on her own dying father, or watch a blinded man whimper in pain and not give one cold cuss.

It was better to live; better to carry a memory of a memory, than suffer the vast burden of knowing. He was not meant to think like a god.

I think if you believe in past lives, I must have been an extremely deprived being. I must have been mistreated, beaten, and forced into indentured servitude because this life has just been phenomenal.

The greatest evil is physical pain.

I've dealt with a lot of physical pain, with a lot of emotional pain; anybody's who's ever been an alcoholic has handled both of those in extreme.

When you're in this world, you don't get to pick and choose what you go through.

It is the little things that pierce and burn and prick for years to come.

But I think the majority of cows, and even more so chickens and pigs, are leading pretty miserable lives.

You have friends, and they die. You have a disease, someone you care about has a disease, Wall Street people are scamming everyone, the poor get poorer, the rich get richer. That's what we're surrounded by all the time.

'The Glass Castle' by Jeannette Walls is the quintessential dysfunctional family.

I never thought it was fair for an 8-year-old child not to be able to afford shoes, or to wander the streets having to beg for money. To know that child's joy would end soon, when they realised there was no future.

Life is not to be expended in vain regrets. No day, no hour, comes but brings in its train work to be performed for some useful end - the suffering to be comforted, the wandering led home, the sinner reclaimed. Oh! How can any fold the hands to rest and say to the spirit, 'Take thine ease, for all is well!'

Nothing seemed more important to me than to make the world aware of the senseless death and starvation in South Sudan. I wanted people to see through the eyes of the suffering so my photos might motivate the international community to act.

I have been touched by extreme violence, and I have been robbed of the life I always wanted by someone who chose to do evil.

I remember being in New Orleans after Katrina hearing people calling, 'Help me,' and wanting to slide down in the seat of my car because it felt like I was invading their suffering. But I also know that our being there gave them a voice.

When people suffer, their relationships usually suffer as well. Period. And we all suffer because, as the Buddha says, that's the nature of being human and wanting stuff we don't always get.

I'd lie in bed in my dormitory and grab at bits of my body, wanting to tear them off... I was so large by then that, in the heat, my thighs chafed together and bled. I was very unhappy, and yet no one ever asked me how I felt.

I love playing a woman suffering, thinking about the choices that she's made and obviously wanting more. It's classic.