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Quotes About Pain

Thought in the mind hath made us, What we are By thought was wrought and built. If a man's mind Hath evil thoughts, pain comes on him as comes The wheel the ox behind.... ..If one endure In purity of thought, joy follows him As his own shadow—sure.
~ James Allen
Unrest and pain and sorrow are the shadows of life.
~ James Allen
Los pensamientos en la mente nos hacen lo que somos Nos forjan y moldean. Si albergas en tu mente pensamientos inferiores, el dolor te seguirá como sigue el arado al buey . . . Si en cambio tus pensamientos son elevados, te seguirá la dicha como tu propia sombra, es un hecho.
~ James Allen
Noticing your reactions to suffering, anger, pain is the key to well-being.
~ James Altucher
Perfectionism is your brain trying to protect you from harm—from coming up with an idea that is embarrassing and stupid and could cause you to suffer pain.
~ James Altucher
People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget.
~ James Baldwin
I was guilty and irritated and full of love and pain. I wanted to kick him and I wanted to take him in my arms.
~ James Baldwin
The occurrence of an event is not the same thing as knowing what it is that one has lived through. Most people had not lived -- nor could it, for that matter, be said that they had died-- through any of their terrible events. They had simply been stunned by the hammer. They passed their lives thereafter in a kind of limbo of denied and unexamined pain. The great question that faced him this morning was whether or not had had ever, really, been present at his life.
~ James Baldwin
It takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both. People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.
~ James Baldwin
I imagine that one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, that they will be forced to deal with pain.
~ James Baldwin
All for the first time, in the days when acts had no consequences and nothing was irrecoverable, and love was simple and even pain had the dignity of enduring forever: it was unimaginable that time could do anything to diminish it.
~ James Baldwin
But it's not possible to forget anybody you were that hung up on, who was that hung up on you. You can't forget anything that hurt so badly, went so deep, and changed the world forever. It's not possible to forget anybody you've destroyed.
~ James Baldwin
But I know about suffering; if that helps. I know that it ends. I ain't going to tell you no lies, like it always ends for the better. Sometimes it ends for the worse. You can suffer so bad that you can be driven to a place where you can't ever suffer again: and that's worse.
~ James Baldwin
But I felt that it was my heart which was broken. Something had broken in me to make me so cold and so perfectly still and far away.
~ James Baldwin
The way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people's pain.
~ James Baldwin
hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the one who hated, and this is an immutable law...i imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense that once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.
~ James Baldwin
There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one's head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people's pain. You ought to have some apprehension that the man you see before you was once even younger than you are now and arrived at his present wretchedness by imperceptible degrees.
~ James Baldwin
She, who had descended with such joy and pain, had begun her upward climb—upward, with her baby, on the steep, steep side of the mountain.
~ James Baldwin
Some moments in a life, and they needn't be very long or seem very important, can make up for so much in that life; can redeem, justify, that pain, that bewilderment, with which one lives, and invest one with the courage not only to endure it, but to profit from it; some moments teach one the price of the human connection: if one can live with one's own pain, then one respects the pain of others, and so, briefly, but transcendentally, we can release each other from pain.
~ James Baldwin
So that any writer, looking back over even so short a span of time as I am here forced to assess, finds that the things which hurt him and the things which helped him cannot be divorced from each other; he could be helped in a certain way only because he was hurt in a certain way; and his help is simply to be enabled to move from one conundrum to the next—one is tempted to say that he moves from one disaster to the next.
~ James Baldwin
And my mind was empty—or it was as though my mind had become one enormous, anaesthetized wound. I thought only, One day I'll weep for this. One of these days I'll start to cry
~ James Baldwin
People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.
~ James Baldwin
For the horrors of the American Negro's life there has been almost no language.
~ James Baldwin
He had been bruised so badly that the eyes of strangers lacerated him like salt.
~ James Baldwin