Quotes About Pain

To live is to be happy to live. The usefulness of life ah! its expansion has not the mystic shapes we vainly dreamed of when we were paralyzed by youth. Rather has it a shape of anxiety, of shuddering, of pain and glory. Our heart is not made for the abstract formula of happiness, since the truth of things is not made for it either. It beats for emotion and not for peace. Such is the gravity of the truth.

Human suffering is a positive thing, which requires a positive answer, and sad as it is, the word is beautiful, because of the absolute truth it contains.[...] It is an error to believe that we can be happy in perfect calm and clearness, as abstract as a formula. We are made too much out of shadow and some form of suffering. If everything that hurts us were to be removed, what would remain?

Nous serons reconnus par les grandes douleurs.

Tu pleures, tant ta peine est grande, Dans un désert, sans rien savoir… Et moi, debout auprès du soir, Je suis triste comme une offrande

Hélas, ô sacrifice, ô gloire, Ô silence qui va saigner.

It was suicide. Others killed themselves with poison or with a revolver. I killed myself with minutes and hours.

I keep remembering — I keep remembering. My heart has no pity on me.

il me faisait découvrir des auteurs qui savaient mettre tout plein de mots qui coupaient dans mon ventre, et alors ça faisait du bien de saigner un peu.

Composition is a process of combination, in which thought puts together complementary truths, and talent fuses into harmony the most contrary qualities of style. So that there is no composition without effort, without pain even, as in all bringing forth. The reward is the giving birth to something living--something, that is to say, which, by a kind of magic, makes a living unity out of such opposed attributes as orderliness and spontaneity, thought and imagination, solidity and charm.

Torture when inflicted on children becomes indefensible. Even among those who believe that torture is a defensible practice to extract information, the case for inflicting pain and abuse upon children proves impossible to support.

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. —James Baldwin

I shall not say, our life is all in vain, For peace may cheer the desolated hearth; But well I know that, on this weary earth, Round each joy-island is a sea of pain.

You say that love is nonsense....I tell you it is no such thing. For weeks and months it is a steady physical pain, an ache about the heart, never leaving one, by night or by day a long strain on one's nerves like toothache or rheumatism, not intolerable at any one instant, but exhausting by its steady drain on the strength.

We all carry around so much pain in our hearts. Love and pain and beauty. They all seem to go together like one little tidy confusing package. It's a messy business, life. It's hard to figure--full of surprises. Some good. Some bad.

You say that love is nonsense.... I tell you it is no such thing. For weeks and months it is a steady physical pain, an ache about the heart, never leaving one, by night or by day; a long strain on one's nerves like toothache or rheumatism, not intolerable at any one instant, but exhausting by its steady drain on the strength.

Every day, we wake up empty and scared." So start by accepting that it's okay to suffer or to feel depressed at times. And then learn to distinguish between the pain that is unavoidable and the suffering that we create for ourselves.

Why should people be so helplessly affected by agony they cannot remove?

We fight it down, and we live it down, or we bear it bravely well, But the best men die of a broken heart for the things they cannot tell.

Every man is his own hell.

There are two things in life that a sage must preserve at every sacrifice, the coats of his stomach and the enamel of his teeth. Some evils admit of consolations, but there are no comforters for dyspepsia and the toothache.

We lauhed together for a long time. When we had first met, her eyes were dull with pain-killing drugs and if she tried to talk, her face would controt with agonizing pain. I thought how radiantly beautiful she now looked. She stood up to leave and went to the door but then came back and kissed me. `I hope I never see you again,' she said. `I quite understand,' I replied.

When I tell a patient that I think I should do their operation under local anaesthetic they usually look a little shocked. In fact the brain cannot itself feel pain since pain is a phenomenon produced within the brain.

You might expect that seeing so much pain and suffering might help you keep your own difficulties in perspective but, alas, it does not.

I learned a long time ago in the outpatient clinic to make no distinction –as some condescending doctors still do –between 'real' or 'psychological' pain. All pain is produced in the brain, and the only way pain can vary, other than in its intensity, is how it is best treated, or more particularly in my clinic, whether surgery might help or not.