Quotes About Suffering

It was a constant agony, consuming and debilitating as a toothache.

my head hurt in a petty nagging way that wasn't quite worth a painkiller.

He ached with weariness, but it became part of him; he scarcely noticed now that he was weary, he might always have been thus, it was so familiar to him.

People went up and down Sixth Avenue with the word motherfucker in their heads. They felt no emotions, had no sensation of life, love, or the pursuit of happiness, but only the knowledge of being stuck between a Thursday and a Saturday, air and things, this thought and the next, philosophy and action; birth, death, God, the devil, heaven, and hell. There was no escape, ever, was what people felt.

note the similarities with buddhism a buddhist who has achieved nirvana is not sad primarily because it does not know the concept of sad [...]

other people very clearly, especially the ways we perpetuate our own suffering, driven by habitual impulses and patterns but oblivious to their root causes.

There are several forms of the loving-kindness meditation. Here's one. Just as I want to be free from suffering, may all beings be free from suffering.

When someone says to us, as Thich Nhat Hanh suggests, "Darling, I care about your suffering," a deep healing begins.

Suffering is our call to attention, our call to investigate the truth of our beliefs.

Perfection is not a prerequisite for anything but pain.

Overcome any bitterness that may have come because you were not up to the magnitude of the pain that was entrusted to you. Like the mother of the world who carries the pain of the world in her heart, each of us is part of her heart and is, therefore, endowed with a certain measure of cosmic pain. You are sharing in the totality of that pain. You are called upon to meet it in joy instead of self-pity. -Sufi poetry

When we disconnect from the body, we are pulling away from the energetic expression of our being that connects us with all of life. By imagining a great tree uprooted from earth, we can sense the unnaturalness, violence, and suffering of this severed belonging. The experience of being uprooted is a kind of dying.

Through Buddhist awareness practices, we free ourselves from the suffering of trance by learning to recognize what is true in the present moment, and by embracing whatever we see with an open heart. This cultivation of mindfulness and compassion is what I call Radical Acceptance.

This is the suffering of fear. Fear is part of being alive. Other people experience this too . . . I am not alone. May I be kind to myself . . . may I give myself the compassion I need.

As we figuratively sit beside ourselves and inquire, listen and name our experience, we see Mara clearly and open our heart in tenderness for the suffering before us.

Offering companionship in pain acknowledges that suffering is living through all of us, and in our togetherness we enlarge the heartspace that can hold it with compassion.

in exposing vulnerability we are always taking a chance and sometimes might get hurt ... the greater hurt, the real suffering, is in staying armored and isolated.

Strange how for the last five hundred years the fate of The Jews had so often been tied to our own (Muslims') future. Where we suffer, they suffer. Where we prosper, they prosper. Where they are present and we are not, they fail to defend themselves and are slaughtered like sheep.It is the same story here, in al-Abdalus and in al-Quds,Baghdad, Cairo and Damascus. (A Sultan In Palermo, Islam Quintet 4, Tariq Ali, page 221, 222)

Your enemy is not the refugee. Your enemy is the one who made him a refugee.

Hjarta mitt? Det er mørkt og stygt i hjarta mitt. Ikkje nemn det.

As Shantideva writes in this beautiful prayer: As long as space endures As long as sentient beings remain, Until then may I too remain To dispel the miseries of the world.

Karma is the seed that ripens into suffering. But karmic actions are triggered by our delusions, which themselves can be broken down into our afflictive emotions and the fundamental confusion that is the root cause.

The Buddha uses the framework of the four noble truths to formulate this insight: the first truth, the truth of suffering, is the illness. The second truth, the truth of the origin of suffering, refers to the cause of the illness. The third truth, the truth of cessation, is the understanding that a complete cure is possible. And the fourth truth, the truth of the path that leads to cessation, is the cure.

As long as there is consciousness, these two potentials exist—the potential to become enlightened and the potential to suffer.