Quotes About Suffering

For what is most dreaded is not the agony of dying, nor yet the strange impossibility that when we do not exist we should suffer for not existing. What is dreaded is the defeat of a present will directed upon life and its various undertakings.

Only the dead have seen the end of the war.

I still believe that capitalism is too harsh and I believe that, even within that, there is a lot of satisfaction and beauty if you happen to be one of the lucky ones, although that doesn't eradicate the reality of the suffering. It's all true at once, kind of humming and sublime.

What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness. Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering and I responded… sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly.

Sometimes it crosses my mind that the things I write here are nothingother than images that prisoners or sailors tattoo on their skin.

History is man-made, like this pair of shoes, though it pinches more.

The aim of therapy is to convert neurotic suffering into ordinary human misery.

And it is as you reap comfort from being white that we suffer for being Black and people of color. This is how we are tied to each other. You see, your comfort is linked to our pain and suffering.

The anguish of the neurotic individual is the same as that of the saint. The neurotic, the saint are engaged in the same battle. Their blood flows from similar wounds. But the first one gasps and the other one gives.

A poor man with nothing in his belly needs hope, illusion, more than bread.

Hell, Madame, is to love no longer.

Hell, madam, is to love no longer.

True pain coming out of a man belongs primarily to God, it seems to me. I try and take it humbly to my heart, just as it is. And I endeavour to make it mine, to love it. I can understand all the hidden meaning of the expression which has become hackneyed now: to commune with, Because I really "commune" with his pain.

Le mensonge n'a jamais paru répréhensible à Mouchette, car mentir est le plus précieux, et sans doute l'unique privilège des misérables.

Oh! Je sais bien que la compassion d'autrui soulage un moment, je ne la méprise point. Mais elle ne désalèere pas, elle s'écoule dans l'âme comme a travers un crible. Et quand notre souffrance passe de pitié en pitié, ainsi que de bouche en bouche, il me semble que nous ne pouvons plus la respecter, ni l'aimer...

He stopped suddenly, put his hand to his throat for a few minutes with his features fixed in a kind of stupid, hopeless searching look. Then his face brightened a little in spite of the anguish which he had doubtlessly forgotten.

Art is a wound turned into light.

I have neither one nor the other, and that has been going on for so long now that I have stopped wondering whether it is hate or love which gives us the strength to continue this life of lies, which provides the formidable energy that allows us to go on suffering, and hoping.

Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness.

The poor are used to stifling any expression of their despair, because they must get on with life, with work, with the demands made of them day after day, hour after hour.

The history of the family can be described through the abandonment of several children. The history of the world, too.

the glitter and wink of the trapped fish inside it.

Regardless of when and how it happens, the dark night of the soul is the transition from bondage to freedom in prayer and in every other aspect of life.

When I looked at my hands and wrists, marred by the marks of small burns from cook pots and flying embers, every red weal or white pucker brings to my mind's eye that eternal fire, and the writhing masses of the damned, among whom I must expect to spend eternity.