Quotes About Pain

we habitually string our thoughts together into a story that tricks us into believing that our identity, our happiness, our pain, and our problems are all solid and separate entities. In fact, like thoughts, all these constructs are constantly changing

we are all addicted to avoiding pain.

Thinking that we can find some lasting pleasure and avoid pain is what in Buddhism is called samsara, a hopeless cycle that goes round and round endlessly and causes us to suffer greatly

When we're feeling uncomfortable and irritable and fed up, our thoughts and emotions are probably revolving around something like pain, loss, disgrace, or blame.

Our personal demons come in many guises. We experience them as shame, as jealousy, as abandonment, as rage. They are anything that makes us so uncomfortable that we continually run away.

Every day we could think about the aggression in the world, in New York, Los Angeles, Halifax, Taiwan, Beirut, Kuwait, Somalia, Iraq, everywhere. All over the world, everybody always strikes out at the enemy, and the pain escalates forever. Every day we could reflect on this and ask ourselves, "Am I going to add to the aggression in the world?" Every day, at the moment when things get edgy, we can just ask ourselves, "Am I going to practice peace, or am I going to war?

Awakeness is found in our pleasure and our pain, our confusion and our wisdom. It's available in each moment of our weird, unfathomable, ordinary everyday lives.

All over the world, everybody always strikes out at the enemy, and the pain escalates forever. Every day we could reflect on this and ask ourselves, Am I going to add to the aggression in the world? Every day, at the moment when things get edgy, we can just ask ourselves, Am I going to practice peace, or am I going to war?

First, we like pleasure; we are attached to it. Conversely, we don't like pain. Second, we like and are attached to praise. We try to avoid criticism and blame. Third, we like and are attached to fame. We dislike and try to avoid disgrace. Finally, we are attached to gain, to getting what we want. We don't like losing what we have.

Most of us do not take these situations as teachings. We automatically hate them. We run like crazy. We use all kinds of ways to escape—all addictions stem from this moment when we meet our edge and we just can't stand it. We feel we have to soften it, pad it with something, and we become addicted to whatever it is that seems to ease the pain.

Only to the degree that we've gotten to know our personal pain, only to the degree that we've related with pain at all, will we be fearless enough, brave enough, and enough of a warrior to be willing to feel the pain of others.

this letting things go is sometimes called nonattachment, but not with the cool, remote quality often associated with that word. this nonattachment has more kindness and more intimacy than that. it's actually a desire to know, like the questions of a three-year-old. we want to know our pain so we can stop endlessly running. we want to know our pleasure so we can stop endlessly grasping.

Algebra, like laudanum, deadens pain, Fritz wrote.

Above all, though, we don't want a weakly habit of constant complaint. As a rough guide, remember that while the average man is ill for four days a year, a grown woman must expect to spend one fourth of her life in actual pain. Daisy felt a rush of admiration. So far she herself had done nothing like her fair share.

It was like one of those terrible sights of the racecourse or the battle field where wallowing living beings persevere dumbly in their duty although mutilated beyond repair.

Her face, suddenly, contorts. The lips pinch and tighten. A hand crawls across the sheet. Lisa says, 'Are you all right?' 'No, says Claudia. 'But who is?

A dor faz-nos cruéis, A dor muito prolongada faz-nos cruéis e indiferentes à crueldade, o que é ainda pior.

We enter this world with birth pains and we leave with similar pains of death.

Who can give more heat to the fire, or joy to heaven, or pain to hell? A ring upon a nun is like a ring in a sow's nose. Your best friend is still alive. Who is that? You. The sun is none the worse for shining on a dunghill. He must needs swim that is borne up to the chin. An hour's cold will suck out seven years of heat.

My Voice grew faint through the Curtain of my Pain.

I realized that in order to touch the woman behind the grandmother I knew, the one who never spoke in a direct way about her past, I had to bring the pain of the past into the landscape of the present.

The pain from his arthritis was sewn through the fabric of his day, like a bright needle threaded with dull wire.

And then Lucinda was like an athlete who, with her body warm, has ripped a muscle and not felt it. As she cooled, she stiffened, and felt-it hurt more than you would think possible-the damage.

Some time later, I sat in the wine cellar, staring at the walls while cradling a wineskin in my lap like a child, murmuring over and over as if lulling the child to sleep, 'I am shat upon. I am shat upon'.