Quotes About Suffering

The niggers did not post sentries over their dead. Niggers did not pound on the door of the sheriff, they did not haunt the offices of the newspapermen. No sheriff paid them any mind, no journalist listened to their stories. The bodies of their loved ones disappeared into sacks and reappeared in the cool cellars of medical schools to relinquish their secrets. Every one of them a miracle, in Stevens's view, providing instruction into the intricacies of God's design.

That they ride in a box on a rope in a pit. That they are in the void.

Ajarry didn't even make it to the gunwale when she tried to jump overboard. Her simpering posture and piteous aspect, recognizable from thousands of slaves before her, betrayed her intentions. Chained head to toe, head to toe, in exponential misery.

He told me once that there was no better faith than a wounded faith and sometimes I wonder if that is what he was doing all along --trying to wound his faith in order to test it--and I was just another stone in the way of his God.

You can count the dead, but you can't count the cost. We've got no math for Heaven...

The children looked like remnants of themselves. Spectral. Some were naked to the waist.Many of them had sores on their faces. None had shoes. He could see the structures of them through their skin. The bony residue of their lives.

Pain's nothing. Pain's what you give, not what you get.

there was always hunger in Ireland. She was a country that liked to be hurt. The Irish heaped coals of fire upon their own heads. They were unable to extinguish the fire. They were dependent,as always, on others. They had no notions of self-reliance. They burned and then poured empty buckets down upon themselves. It had always been so.

How far from real the truth is. I wanted then to take every murdering bastard in Northern Ireland, and have them sleep for a night in my boy's blue rowboat, out on the lough, in the dark, among the reeds, turning in primal celtic patterns.

He was standing on the little ledge of reality he had left, but it seemed to me that he wasn't getting high, just getting level. He had an affinity with pain. If he couldn't cure it, he took it on.

I am already and always beaten, my love.

What is demanded of man is not, as some existential philosophers teach, to endure the meaninglessness of life, but rather to bear his incapacity to grasp its unconditional meaningfulness in rational terms.

Our generation is realistic, for we have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord's Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.

Since Auschwitz we know what man is capable of. And since Hiroshima we know what is at stake.

To suffer unecessarily is masochistic rather than heroic.

To Suffer unnecessarily is masochistic rather than heroic.

Instead of possibilities, I have realities in my past, not only the reality of work done and of love loved, but of sufferings bravely suffered. These sufferings are even the things of which I am most proud, though these are things which cannot inspire envy.

The incurable sufferer is given very little opportunity to be proud of his suffering and to consider it ennobling rather than degrading so that he is not only unhappy, but also ashamed of being unhappy.

It is the very pursuit of happiness that thwarts happiness.

Thus suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little. Therefore the 'size' of human suffering is absolutely relative.

Not every conflict is necessarily neurotic; some amount of conflict is normal and healthy. In a similar sense suffering is not always a pathological phenomenon; rather than being a symptom of neurosis, suffering may well be a human achievement, especially if the suffering grows out of existential frustration... Existential frustration is neither pathological or pathogenic.

the meaning of life always changes, but that it never ceases to be. According to logotherapy, we can discover this meaning in life in three different ways: (1) by creating a work or doing a deed; (2) by experiencing something or encountering someone; and (3) by the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering.

Suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning

a man's suffering is similar to the behavior of gas. If a certain quantity of gas is pumped into an empty chamber, it will fill the chamber completely and evenly, no matter how big the chamber. Thus suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little.