Quotes About Suffering

It can be said that they were worthy of their sufferings; the way they bore their suffering was a genuine inner achievement. It is this spiritual freedom—which cannot be taken away—that makes life meaningful and purposeful.

There is much wisdom in the words of Nietzsche: "He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.

Our generation is realistic, for we have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who in­ vented 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.

His faith in the future and his will to live had become paralyzed and his body fell victim to illness

Los supervivientes de los campos aún recordamos a los hombres que iban a los barracones a consolar a los demás, ofreciéndoles su único mendrugo de pan. Quizá no fueron muchos, pero esos pocos son una muestra irrefutable de que al hombre se le puede arrebatar todo, salvo una cosa: la libertad humana —la libre elección de la acción personal ante las circunstancias— para elegir el propio camino.

When a man finds that it is his destiny to suffer, he will have to accept his suffering as his task; his single and unique task. He will have to acknowledge the fact that even in suffering he is unique and alone in the universe. No one can relieve him of his suffering or suffer in his place. His unique opportunity lies in the way in which he bears his burden. For

Comprendí que un hombre despojado de todo todavía puede conocer la felicidad —aunque sea solo por un instante— si contempla al ser amado.

And what about man? Are you sure that the human world is a terminal point in the evolution of the cosmos? Is it not conceivable that there is still another dimension, a world beyond man's world; a world in which the question of an ultimate meaning of human suffering would find an answer?

No nos entraba en la cabeza que nos lo quitarían todo, absolutamente todo.

Those who have not gone through a similar experience can hardly conceive of the soul-destroying mental conflict and clashes of will power which a famished man experiences.

De esa observación dedujo que no es el sufrimiento en sí mismo el que madura o enturbia al hombre, es el hombre el que da sentido al sufrimiento. Hasta tal punto resulta esencial la postura del hombre que Frankl le arrancó al Lager una gran lección existencial: «El sufrimiento, en cierto modo, deja de ser sufrimiento cuando encuentra un sentido...».

Once an individual's search for a meaning is successful, it not only renders him happy but also gives him the capability to cope with suffering.

Why to live for enabled them to bear the How.

He describes poignantly the prisoners who gave up on life, who had lost all hope for a future and were inevitably the first to die.

We walked slowly along the road leading from the camp. Soon our legs hurt and threatened to buckle. But we limped on; we wanted to see the camp's surroundings for the first time with the eyes of free men. Freedom - we repeated to ourselves, and yet we could not grasp it. We had said this word so often during all the years we dreamed about it, that it had lost its meaning. Its reality did not penetrate into our consciousness; we could not grasp the fact that freedom was ours.

sentimiento que se convierte en sufrimiento deja de serlo en cuanto nos formamos una idea clara y precisa de él»

But there was no need to be ashamed of tears, for tears bore witness that a man had the greatest of courage, the courage to suffer. Only very few realized that. Shamefacedly some confessed occasionally that they had wept, like the comrade who answered my question of how he had gotten over his edema, by confessing, "I have wept it out of my system." The

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.

Cuando un hombre descubre que su destino es sufrir, ha de aceptarlo porque el sufrimiento se convierte en su única y singular tarea. Es más, tendrá que llegar a la conciencia de que ese destino doloroso le otorga el valor de persona única e irrepetible. Nadie puede redimirlo de su sufrimiento ni sufrir por él. Sin embargo, es en su actitud frente al dolor donde reside la posibilidad de conseguir un logro excepcional.

To live is to suffer, to survive is to find meaning in the suffering

man has suffered another loss in his more recent development inasmuch as the traditions which buttressed his behavior are now rapidly diminishing. No instinct tells him what he has to do, and no tradition tells him what he ought to do; sometimes he does not even know what he wishes to do. Instead, he either wishes to do what other people do (conformism) or he does what other people wish him to do (totalitarianism). A

The experience of disillusionment is different. Here it was not one's fellow man (whose superficiality and lack of feeling was so disgusting that one finally felt like creeping into a hole and neither hearing nor seeing human beings any more) but fate itself which seemed so cruel. A man who for years had thought he had reached the absolute limit of all possible suffering now found that suffering has no limits, and that he could suffer still more, and still more intensely.

What does Spinoza say in his Ethics? —"Affectus, qui passio est, desinit esse passio simulatque eius claram et distinctam formamus ideam." Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it. The

despair is suffering without meaning