Quotes About Suffering

People are always selling the idea that people with mental illness are suffering. I think madness can be an escape. If things are not so good, you maybe want to imagine something better.

I have a toothache today. I never seem to be able to rise above a toothache. It makes me want to howl, break things, pull noses, tweak ears, screech.

I don't care what you do to me, but I don't want you to hurt me. I've had enough hurt already in my life. More than enough. Now I want to be happy.

You must let suffering speak, if you want to hear the truth

All of our suffering in life is from saying we want one thing and doing another.

I don't know where we got the notion that God wants us to suffer. Every living thing tends toward the good or we would have been gone a long time ago.

I think Haiti is a place that suffers so much from neglect that people only want to hear about it when it's at its extreme. And that's what they end up knowing about it.

We are sick of war, we don't want to fight, And yet we gorge ourselves upon the dead.

Pleasure puts you to sleep and pain wakes you up. If you don't want to suffer, don't go to sleep.

People come and go, pain comes and goes. But so does joy. And if our hearts are closed because we don't want to suffer, they won't be open enough to recognize the joy as it flies by.

Millions of people are suffering: they want to be loved but they don't know how to love. And love cannot exist as a monologue; it is a dialogue, a very harmonious dialogue.

you must cry out if you want help. It is no use whatsoever to suffer in silence. Who will succour the drowning man if he does not clamour for his life?

Despair … is the ultimate development of a pride so great and so stiff-necked that it selects the absolute misery of damnation rather than accept happiness from the hands of God and thereby acknowledge that He is above us and that we are not capable of fulfilling our destiny by ourselves.

I begrudge God none of this. I do not curse him or bemoan my lot. And though my heart keeps beating only to keep breaking- I do not question why.

And though my heart keeps beating only to keep breaking-- I do not question why.

17Remember, it is better to suffer for doing good, if that is what God wants, than to suffer for doing wrong!

To embrace suffering culminates in greater empathy, the capacity to feel what it is like for the other to suffer, which is the ground for unsentimental compassion and love. (157)

The fundamental experience of human suffering is the experience of alienation from the self, from the source—from God.

Struggle," says Swami Kripalu, "changes an ordinary human into a spiritually awake person.

In the desertI saw a creature, naked, bestial,Who, squatting upon the ground,Held his heart in his hands,And ate of it.I said, "Is it good, friend?""It is bitter—bitter," he answered;"But I like it"Because it is bitter,"And because it is my heart."

It was as if pain were a room he had entered and the door had been locked behind him.

Trying to remember you is like carrying water in my hands a long distance across sand. Somewhere people are waiting. They have drunk nothing for days.

Isn't that why you want to shoot yourself? To make a protest against change?

When a man was hit hard enough for evacuation, he was usually very happy, and we were happy for him—he had a ticket out to the hospital, or even a ticket home—alive. "When a man was killed—he looked 'so peaceful.' His suffering was over.