Quotes About Suffering

Stories like yours and worse than yours are all around, and your suffering won't mark you out as special, though your response to it might.

Poor countries in the developing world paid first, but the rest of us are paying now, as those policies and the suffering they impose come home to roost via right-wing economics that savages unions, education systems, the environment, and programs for the poor, disabled, and elderly in the name of privatization, free markets, and tax cuts.

James's investigation concluded that human beings respond with initiative, orderliness, and helpfulness; they remain calm; and suffering and loss are transformed when they are shared experiences.

It's hard to say what difference we make, but we meet people who are hungry, people who bless us, and people who turn away because they're busy shooting up, or crack has taken away their appetites, or suffering has driven them mad. Few remember that there was no significant US homeless population before the 1980s, that Ronald Reagan's new society and economy created these swollen ranks of street people.

That made clear to me the continuum that stretches from minor social misery to violent silencing and violent death

Addressing our own suffering while learning not to inflict it on others is part of the work we're all here to do.

Buddhism takes change as a given and suffering as the inevitable consequence of attachment and then asks what you are going to do about it. Suffering, though, is not the most accurate translation of the Pali word dukkha. Dukkha means sky, ether, or hole, particularly an axle hole. Sukkha was a good axle hole for a wheel, while dukkha was a poor one, one that made the wheel wobble and bump, jolting the load. It could be translated as discord or disturbance, the antithesis of harmony or serenity.

There is always someone whose suffering is greater than yours. The reproaches are often framed as though there is an economy of suffering, and of compassion, and you should measure yourself, price yourself, with the same sense of scarcity and finite resources that govern monetary economies, but there is no measure of either.

Whatever fears, whatever sense of vulnerability may underlie such behavior, it also comes out of entitlement, the entitlement to inflict suffering and even death on other people. It breeds misery in the perpetrator and the victims. (The Longest War)

Crazy is often a euphemism for unbearable suffering.

It's important to say what hope is not: it is not the belief that everything was, is, or will be fine. The evidence is all around us of tremendous suffering and tremendous destruction. The hope I'm interested in is about broad perspectives with specific possibilities, ones that invite or demand that we act.

She breathed in the vast world of suffering and pure, dark love, and as she did, a well of compassion began to flow in her.

English persons, therefore, of humanitarian and reformist disposition constantly went out to the Balkan Peninsula to see who was in fact ill-treating whom, and, being by the very nature of their perfectionist faith unable to accept the horrid hypothesis that everybody was ill-treating everybody else, all came back with a pet Balkan people established in their hearts as suffering and innocent, eternally the massacree and never the massacrer.

If Cuba is Hell, Miami is Purgatory.

Aun la desgracia, para que pueda ser verdaderamente desgracia, tiene que contar con un instante de consuelo; de no ser así, ni siquiera tendría sentido como desgracia.

HÉ™yat , kiminsÉ™ hesab?na yaÅŸamaq demÉ™kdir. Biz ham?m?z bir-birimizdÉ™n yeyirik. Ancaq insanda , hÉ™rdÉ™n dÉ™ olsa , xeyirxahl?q q???lc?m? olur , gÉ™rÉ™k, ona toxunmayasan , qoyasan qala. YaÅŸamaq çÉ™tinl???ndÉ™ o kömÉ™yÉ™ gÉ™lir.

Remarque Erich Maria

Vivre les malheurs à l'avance, c'est les subir deux fois.

Vivre les malheurs d'avance, c'est les subir deux fois. Le moment présent était un moment de joie, il ne fallait pas l'empoisonner.

Sous cette brume empoisonnée par leurs fatigues d'hier, des millions d'hommes s'éveillent, déjà exténués d'aujourd'hui.

What is it in our world that breeds such howling despair?

THE OBSERVATION THAT good people suffer, and evil people keep enjoying benefits and recognition, is short-sighted. Also, this kind of conclusion might have been made in haste. If one analyses carefully, one finds that troublemakers are definitely not happy. It is better to behave well and take responsibility for one's actions, and lead a positive life.

So commonplace was crucifixion in the Roman Empire that Cicero referred to it as "that plague." Among the citizenry, the word "cross" (crux) became a popular and particularly vulgar taunt, akin to "go hang yourself.

But Jesus's message was designed to be a direct challenge to the wealthy and the powerful, be they the occupiers in Rome, the collaborators in the Temple, or the new moneyed class in the Greek cities of Galilee. The message was simple: the Lord God had seen the suffering of the poor and dispossessed; he had heard their cries of anguish. And he was finally going to do something about it