Quotes About Suffering

In Anglo-Saxon countries the prostitutes look as if they purveyed, along with sin, the attendant pains of hell.

The expression if history in things is no other than that of past torment.

Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they're only animals.

The great artists were never those whose works embodied style in its least fractured, most perfect form but those who adopted style as a rigor to set against the chaotic expression of suffering, as a negative truth.

Das Bedürfnis, Leiden beredt werden zu lassen, ist Bedingung aller Wahrheit. (The need to lend a voice to suffering [literally: "to let suffering be eloquent"] is the condition of all truth)

Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems.

Il mondo nuovo è un unico campo di concentramento che si crede un paradiso, non essendoci nulla da contrapporgli.

Wenn aber in Zeiten wie den heutigen die Not am höchsten ist, öffnet sich der Himmel und schleudert sein Feuer auf die, die ohnehin verloren sind.

I learned early in my life that if people were offered the opportunity of tranquility, they often reject it and choose torment instead.

We need everyone who suffers to be a victim because only thus can we maintain our pretense to universal understanding and experience the warm glow of our own compassion, so akin to the warmth that a strong, stiff drink imparts in the cold.

The social and cultural critic Theodor Adorno eloquently voiced this cast of mind when he proclaimed the final death of art after the Second World War. After Auschwitz, he said, it was no longer possible to produce fine art. The world had become too horrible. 'There is nothing innocuous left,' he declared. 'The

If I were personally to define religion, I would say that it is a bandage that man has invented to protect a soul made bloody by circumstances.

Pain wanders through my bones like a lost fire

I do not laugh; I do not cry; I'm sweating out the will to die. My past is sliding down the drain; I soon will be myself again.

The only tyrannies from which men, women and children are suffering in real life are the tyrannies of minorities.

There is quite enough sorrow and shame and suffering and baseness in real life, and there is no need for meeting it unnecessarily in fiction.

literature must always be about gloom of one sort or another, on the principle that there is nothing interesting to be said about happy people.

The best of all things for earthly men is not to be born and not to see the beams of the bright sun; but if born, then as quickly as possible to pass the gates of Hades, and to lie deep buried.

It's true, I suffer a great deal-- but do I suffer well ? That is the question.

When another person makes you suffer, it is because he suffers deeply within himself, and his suffering is spilling over. He does not need punishment; he needs help. That's the message he is sending.

People have a hard time letting go of their suffering. Out of a fear of the unknown, they prefer suffering that is familiar.

The seed of suffering in you may be strong, but don't wait until you have no more suffering before allowing yourself to be happy.

Suffering is not enough. Life is both dreadful and wonderful...How can I smile when I am filled with so much sorrow? It is natural--you need to smile to your sorrow because you are more than your sorrow.

Carry the cross patiently, and with perfect submission and in the end it shall carry you.