Quotes About Suffering

consciousness is a terrible curse. I think. I feel. I suffer.

When one considers the multitude of unsung of every race, ethnicity, gender, perhaps toiling away in obscurity, their work thrown out after their deaths by philistine relatives and vulgarian landlords, one must weep. And one does.

It hurts to breathe. It hurts to live. I hate her, yet I do not think I can exist without her.

There's nothing wrong with conceptualization per se; but when we take our opinions about any event to be some kind of absolute truth and fail to see that they are opinions, then we suffer. That's false suffering.

So there are two kinds of suffering. One is when we feel we're being pressed down; as though suffering is coming at us from without, as though we're receiving something that's making us suffer. The other kind of suffering is being under, just bearing it, just being it.

It's the play of our minds, of conceptualization about anything that happens to us, that is the problem. There's nothing wrong with conceptualization per se; but when we take our opinions about any event to be some kind of absolute truth and fail to see that they are opinions, then we suffer.

Death is agony. There is simply no other way to describe it. It is getting the wind knocked out of you over and over again, and just when you think you have enough strength to take a deep breath, it knocks you down again. There is no break from the pain. It is arduous, unyielding.

When Suffering knocks at your door and you say there is no seat left for him, he tells you not to worry because he has brought his own stool.

You think you are the greatest sufferer in the world? Do you know that men are sometimes banished for life? Do you know that men sometimes lose all their yams and even their children? I had six wives once. I have none now except that young girl who knows not her right from her left. Do you know how many children I have buried—children I begot in my youth and strength? Twenty-two. I did not hang myself, and I am still alive.

The poor of the world may be guilty of this and that particular fault or foolishness, but if we are fair we will admit that nothing they have done or left undone quite explains all the odds we see stacked up against them. We are sometimes tempted to look upon the poor as so many ne'er-do-wells we can simply ignore. But they will return to haunt our peace, because they are greater than their badge of suffering, because they are human.

Real tragedy is never resolved. It goes on hopelessly forever.

For whom is it well, for whom is it well. There is no one for whom it is well.

For whom is it well, for whom is it well? For no one for whom it is well.

She closed her eyes and tried desperately to swim through the mist that enveloped her memories. She was near here and then she wasn't. She was whole and then she was wounded. Forever scarred. And in between? Unknowable, it seemed. Absolutely unknowable.

That is where love and lamentation chance upon one another, and that is where we find God.

Tsunamis. School shootings. Syria. We watch it, we read about it, and then we move on. As a species, we're either very resilient or super callous. I don't know which.

People lose their jobs over this sort of thing. They lose their friends. Their families. They lose everything.

But history does matter. There is a line connecting the Armenians and the Jews and the Cambodians and the Serbs and the Rwandans.

When this war was over, he and his family--all Germans--were going to have to live with the black mark of this (whatever this was) for a long, long time.

The flu was not a pretty way to die. But then, there really weren't pretty ways to die, unless you were granted that rarest of miracles and died in your sleep.

I don't know why people have to die, Son. I don't think death was what God wanted. But it sure was part of somebody's plan. I believe God is big enough and powerful enough to use it. There's more going on here than we can see.

It's not faith to say that when something painful happens, when you lose and lose again and the hurt goes so deep that you don't think you can take another breath, it's all going to work out for good. Faith doesn't explain. It doesn't even need to know or expect a happy ending. That's not what we're promised. Faith is abandoning illusions. It rests in something bigger, something beyond us and our ability. And I suspect you know that now.

The violence of war is random. It does not make sense. And many of those who struggle with loss also struggle with the knowledge that the loss was futile and unnecessary.

U.S. military spending, which consumes half of all discretionary spending, has had a profound social and political cost. Bridges and levees collapse. Schools decay. Domestic manufacturing declines. Trillions in debt threaten the viability of the currency and the economy. The poor, the mentally ill, the sick, and the unemployed are abandoned. Human suffering is the price for victory, which is never finally defined or attainable.