Quotes About Pain

But if these unavoidable separations cause you a measure of pain, they also increase your longing for her, and perhaps that isn't a bad thing, you decide, for you spend your days in the thrall of breathless anticipation, agitated and alert, counting the hours until you can see her and hold her again. Intense. That is the word you use to describe yourself now. You are intense. Your feelings are intense. Your life has become increasingly intense.

A crisscross of light and shadow began to form on the pavement in front of him, and it was a beautiful thing to behold, he felt, a small, unexpected gift on the heels of such sadness and pain.

Bir ölüm ferman? ç?karmak zaten yeterince kötüydü, ama ölmü? bir adam için çal??mak en az onun kadar kötüydü.

Lei ha una storia, e quando una persona è abbastanza fortunata da vivere in una storia, da vivere in un mondo immaginario, i dolori di questo mondo svaniscono. Perché, fino a quando la storia continua, la realtà non esiste più

Lei ha la storia, e quando una persona è abbastanza fortunata da vivere all'interno di una storia, da vivere in un mondo immaginario, i dolori di questo mondo svaniscono. Perché fino a quando la storia continua, la realtà non esiste più.

Els escriptors som éssers ferits. Per això creiem amb una altra realitat.

The walking wounded, opening their veins and bleeding in public.

Everyone is broken-hearted except for the drastically unimaginative

Some very common foods and drinks are aversive. Few people enjoy, at first, coffee, beer, tobacco, or chili pepper. Pleasure from pain is uniquely human. No other animal willingly eats such foods when there are alternatives. Philosophers have often looked for the defining feature of humans—language, rationality, culture, and so on. I'd stick with this: Man is the only animal that likes Tabasco sauce.

If you suffer for something that gives delight, soon the suffering itself can give joy.

The circumstances in which you get pleasure from pain are going to be rare. And this makes sense. As both Bentham and Darwin knew well, the hurt of pain is there to get us to stop doing certain things.

If God exists, maybe He can simultaneously feel the pain and pleasure of every sentient being. But for us mortals, empathy really is a spotlight. It's a spotlight that has a narrow focus, one that shines most brightly on those we love and gets dim for those who are strange or different or frightening.

Another force that can make pain valuable is its power to focus the mind. Whatever the negatives of physical pain—or of emotions such as horror and disgust—they sure are attention grabbers.

pain can relieve anxiety by distracting you from your consciousness.

And so, for benign masochism to work, certain conditions must be met. The pain has to be relatively brief. It has to quickly fade, providing the space for pleasurable contrast. And the damage cannot be severe.

Pain can be better than meditation, because while meditation requires the constant choice to engage with the monkey mind, to gently push away those distracting thoughts, pain does the trick for you.

If your suffering makes me suffer, if I feel what you feel, that's empathy in the sense that I'm interested in here. But if I understand that you are in pain without feeling it myself, this is what psychologists describe as social cognition, social intelligence, mind reading, theory of mind, or mentalizing. It's also sometimes described as a form of empathy—"cognitive empathy" as opposed to "emotional empathy," which is most of my focus.

Most relevant for the purposes here, one lucky accident of this feature of memory is that pain-then-pleasure is recalled as better than pleasure-then-pain. Because of this, even if the amount of pain, taken in isolation, is the same as the amount of pleasure, if the pain comes first, the distortions of memory decrease the pain and increase the pleasure, improving the whole experience.

Zadie Smith: "It hurts just as much as it is worth.

chosen suffering can generate and enhance pleasure, and that it is an essential part of meaningful activities and a meaningful life. And it's often the right thing to do. I'll repeat the quote from Zadie Smith: "It hurts just as much as it is worth." Sometimes pain is a proper acknowledgment of value.

The willful suffering we see in religion—fasting, sacrifice, even self-mutilation—might well reflect a more general feature of what we see as virtuous. It isn't good if it doesn't hurt, so when we do good, we are willing—in fact, eager—to experience pain. This is why savvy charities sponsor walkathons and marathons, not group massages and beach parties.

Pain can be good. The picture we presented earlier, of a scale from 0 to 10, is wrong. Perhaps other creatures work this way, with pain and pleasure on a single continuum. But for people, something can be both a 0 and a 10. Negative experiences and positive experiences—pain and pleasure—are not opposites; thinking of them like low temperatures and high temperatures is a mistake.

We are not built to be happy. Evolution doesn't want us to be in constant bliss any more than it wants us to be pain-free. Pain is information about what's wrong and an inducement to make things better. Sadness and loneliness and shame play similar roles.

If you absorb the suffering of others, then you're less able to help them in the long run because achieving long-term goals often requires inflicting short-term pain.