Suffering Quotes (174) Spiritual Sayings
Summary: Definition of suffering. Suffering, or pain in a broad sense, may be an experience of unpleasantness and aversion associated with the perception of harm or threat of harm in an individual. Suffering is the basic element that makes up the negative valence of affective phenomena. The opposite of suffering is pleasure or happiness
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Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved.
~ Helen Keller
Our human compassion binds us the one to the other - not in pity or patronizingly, but as human beings who have learnt how to turn our common suffering into hope for the future.
~ Nelson Mandela
I see the world being slowly transformed into a wilderness; I hear the approaching thunder that, one day, will destroy us too. I feel the suffering of millions. And yet, when I look up at the sky, I somehow feel that everything will change for the better, that this cruelty too shall end, that peace and tranquility will return once more.
~ Anne Frank
Without health life is not life; it is only a state of langour and suffering - an image of death.
~ Buddha
We are never so defensless against suffering as when we love.
~ Sigmund Freud
Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.
~ Khalil Gibran
Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.
~ Bertrand Russell
The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of those depths.
~ Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
We think that by protecting ourselves from suffering, we are being kind to ourselves. The truth is we only become more fearful, more hardened and more alienated. We experience ourselves as being separate from the whole. This separateness becomes like a prison for us - a prison that restricts us to our personal hopes and fears, and to caring only for the people nearest to us. Curiously enough, if we primarily try to shield ourselves from discomfort, we suffer. Yet, when we don't close off, when we let our hearts break, we discover our kinship with all beings.
~ Pema Chodron
Never to suffer would never to have been blessed.
~ Edgar Allan Poe
Pain and suffering have come into your life, but remember pain, sorrow, suffering are but the kiss of Jesus - a sign that you have come so close to Him that He can kiss you.
~ Mother Teresa
Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.
~ Haruki Murakami
I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation.
~ Elie Wiesel
Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering - and it's all over much too soon.
~ Woody Allen
One does not love a place the less for having suffered in it, unless it has been all suffering, nothing but suffering.
~ Jane Austen
Man cannot remake himself without suffering, for he is both the marble and the sculptor.
~ Alexis Carrel
So long as little children are allowed to suffer, there is no true love in this world.
~ Isadora Duncan
People have to really suffer before they can risk doing what they love.
~ Chuck Palahniuk
Suffering by nature or chance never seems so painful as suffering inflicted on us by the arbitrary will of another.
~ Arthur Schopenhauer
I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.
~ Elie Wiesel
To be weak is miserable, Doing or suffering.
~ John Milton
For suffering and enduring there is no remedy, but striving and doing.
~ Thomas Carlyle
A cold in the head causes less suffering than an idea.
~ Jules Renard
I believe all suffering is caused by ignorance.
~ Dalai Lama
I suffer for my art and despise the witless moneyed scoundrels who praise it.
~ El Greco
I am only half there when I am ill, and so there is only half a man to suffer. To suffer in one's whole self is so great a violation, that it is not to be endured.
~ D. H. Lawrence
Laughter isn't even the other side of tears. It is tears turned inside out. Truly the suffering is great, here on earth.
~ Alice Walker
Nakedness, hunger, distress of all kinds, death itself have been cheerfully suffered, when the heart was right. It is the feeling of injustice that is insupportable to all men.
~ Thomas Carlyle
The artist is the child in the popular fable, every one of whose tears was a pearl.
~ Heinrich Heine
I sometimes feel ashamed that I am devoting myself to artistic pursuits while so many of our people are suffering and dying for us. It's true that fretting never did any good.
~ Claude Monet
Work is nearly always a torture. If I could find something else I would be much happier, because I could use this other interest as a form of relaxation. Now I cannot relax.
~ Claude Monet
It's amazing how much punishment we can take.
~ Philip Roth
I have never been able to carry out any work coolly. On the contrary it is done, so to speak, with my own blood.
~ Jim Dine
Suffer what there is to suffer, enjoy what there is to enjoy. Regard both suffering and joy as facts of life, and continue chanting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo, no matter what happens. How could this be anything other than the boundless joy of the Law?
~ Nichiren
Everyday hundreds of people came to the hospital... dying, and I have to introduce life into them again... my duty was to compete with death.
~ Ala Bashir
They, the holy ones and weakly,
Who the cross of suffering bore,
Folded their pale hands so meekly,
Spake with us on earth no more!
~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Without our suffering, our work would simply be social work, very good and helpful, but it would not be the work of Jesus Christ, not part of the Redemption.
~ Mother Teresa
I have been bent and broken, but - I hope - into a better shape.
~ Charles Dickens
Courage would be impossible in a world without pain.
~ Lee Strobel
If you seek patience, you will find no better example than the cross. Great patience occurs in two ways: either when one patiently suffers much, or when one suffers things which one is able to avoid and yet does not avoid. Christ endured much on the cross, and did so patiently, because when he suffered he did not threaten; he was led like a sheep to the slaughter and he did not open his mouth.
~ Thomas Aquinas
The universe is a soul making machine, and part of that process is learning, maturing, and growing through difficult and challenging and painful experiences. The point of our lives in this world isn't comfort, but training and preparation for eternity.
~ Lee Strobel
People have a hard time letting go of their suffering. Out of a fear of the unknown, they prefer suffering that is familiar.
~ Nhat Hanh
Only two things can reveal life's great secrets: suffering and love.
~ Paulo Coelho
The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.
~ Milan Kundera
It is true that I have had heartache and tragedy in my life. These are things none of us avoids. Suffering is the price of being alive.
~ Judy Collins
You desire to know the art of living, my friend? It is contained in one phrase: make use of suffering.
~ Henri Frederic Amiel
Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet.
~ Helen Keller
Consciousness and Healing To proceed very far through the desert, you must be willing to meet existential suffering and work it through. In order to do this, the attitude toward pain has to change. This happens when we accept the fact that everything that happens to us has been designed for our spiritual growth.
~ M. Scott Peck
Many suffer from the incurable disease of writing, and it becomes chronic in their sick minds.
~ Juvenal
Those who can soar to the highest heights can also plunge to the deepest depths and the natures which enjoy most keenly are those which also suffer most sharply.
~ Lucy Maud Montgomery
Man has to suffer. When he has no real afflictions, he invents some.
~ Jose Marti
If you put your hand into a fire, does anyone have to tell you to move it? Do you have to decide? No: When your hand starts to burn, it moves. You don’t have to direct it; the hand moves itself. In the same way, once you understand, through inquiry, that an untrue thought causes suffering, you move away from it.
~ Byron Katie
Added to their loveliness was a new mysterious suffering, perfectly silent, visible in the blue puffiness beneath their eyes or the way they would sometimes stop in mid-stride, look down, and shake their heads as though disagreeing with life.
~ Jeffrey Eugenides
It is very difficult also to sacrifice one's suffering. A man will renounce any pleasures you like but he will not give up his suffering.
~ G. I. Gurdjieff
Attachment to being right creates suffering. When you have a choice to be right, or to be kind, choose kind and watch your suffering disappear.
~ Wayne Dyer
Knowledge by suffering entereth,
And life is perfected by death.
~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning
The sufferings that fate inflicts on us should be borne with patience, what enemies inflict with manly courage.
~ Thucydides
Every age, every culture, every custom and tradition has its own character, its own weakness and its own strength, its beauties and cruelties; it accepts certain sufferings as matters of course, puts up patiently with certain evils. Human life is reduced to real suffering, to hell, only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap
~ Hermann Hesse
The reward of suffering is experience
~ Aeschylus
It is the lot of man to suffer.
~ Benjamin Disraeli
The afflicted are not listened to. They are like someone whose tongue has been cut out and who occasionally forgets the fact. When they move their lips no ear perceives any sound. And they themselves soon sink into impotence in the use of language, because of the certainty of not being heard.
~ Simone Weil
It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades.
~ Susan Sontag
Love does not cause suffering: what causes it is the sense of ownership, which is love's opposite
~ Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Listening moves us closer, it helps us become more whole, more healthy, more holy. Not listening creates fragmentation, and fragmentation is the root of all suffering.
~ Margaret J. Wheatley
There is nothing the body suffers which the soul may not profit by.
~ George Meredith
To stop suffering, stop greediness. Greediness is a source of suffering.
~ Gautama Buddha
Everyone suffers wrongs for which there is no remedy
~ E. W. Howe
There's always been physical suffering in comedy.
~ Don Martin
To a large extent, whether you suffer depends on how you respond to a given situation.
~ Dalai Lama
Suffer what there is to suffer. Enjoy what there is to enjoy. Regard both suffering and joy as facts of life.
~ Nichiren
When you are immune to the opinions and actions of others, you won't be the victim of needless suffering.
~ Miguel Angel Ruiz
In the part of this universe that we know there is great injustice, and often the good suffer, and often the wicked prosper, and one hardly knows which of those is the more annoying.
~ Bertrand Russell
Those who inflict must suffer, for they see The work of their own hearts, and this must be Our chastisement or recompense.
~ Percy Bysshe Shelley
If you suffer, thank God! It is a sure sign that you are alive.
~ Elbert Hubbard
The more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt. The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers most.
~ Thomas Merton
A lot of suffering is just getting rid of dross in yourself, and lingering and hanging in the darkness is often - I say this against myself - a failure of imagination, to imagine the door into the light.
J~ ohn O'Donohue
In light of heaven, the worst suffering on earth will be seen to be no more serious than one night in an inconvenient hotel.
~ Teresa of Avila
You must let suffering speak, if you want to hear the truth
~ Cornel West
Like the ocean that remains calm in its depths even when waves rage over its surface, and like the sun that continues shining on high even during storms, we can at each moment create value and develop our state of life, enjoying our existence to the fullest in times of both suffering and joy.
~ Daisaku Ikeda
As long as you think that the cause of your problem is “out there”—as long as you think that anyone or anything is responsible for your suffering—the situation is hopeless. It means that you are forever in the role of victim, that you’re suffering in paradise.
~ Byron Katie
We need to be aware of the suffering, but retain our clarity, calmness and strength so we can help transform the situation.
~ Nhat Hanh
There is so much indifference in the face of suffering. May we overcome indifference with concrete acts of charity.
~ Pope Francis
Idlers cannot even find time to be idle, or the industrious to be at leisure. We must always be doing or suffering
~ Johann Georg Ritter von Zimmermann
If the first mark of a true and living church is love, the second is
suffering. The one is naturally consequent on the other. A
willingness to suffer proves the genuineness of love.
~ John Stott
Wisdom comes alone through suffering.
~ Aeschylus
When suffering knocks at your door and you say there is no seat for him, he tells you not to worry because he has brought his own stool.
~ Chinua Achebe
Don't look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes you'll know you're dead.
~ Tennessee Williams
To each his suff'rings: all are men, / Condemn'd alike to groan, / The tender for another's pain; / Th' unfeeling for his own.
~ Thomas Gray
Is suffering so very serious? ...I'm referring to the kind of suffering a man inflicts on a woman or a woman on a man. It's extremely painful... hardly bearable. But I very much fear that this sort of pain... is no more worthy of respect than old age or illness.
~ Sidonie Gabrielle Colette
How little it takes to make life unbearable: a pebble in the shoe, a cockroach in the spaghetti, a woman's laugh.
~ H. L. Mencken
What was hard to suffer is sweet to remember.
~ Seneca the Younger
There are two kinds of suffering. There is the suffering you run away from, which follows you everywhere. And there is the suffering you face directly, and so become free.
~ Ajahn Chah
When a man finds that it is his destiny to suffer, he will have to accept his suffering as his 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.
~ Viktor E. Frankl
Whatever pain and suffering you've experienced in your life has been a blessing at least in this one regard: you now know some true things that you couldn't have learned any other way.
~ Eric Maisel
One must not think that a person who is suffering is not praying. He is offering up his sufferings to God, and many a time he is praying much more truly than one who goes away by himself and meditates his head off, and, if he has squeezed out a few tears, thinks that is prayer.
~ Teresa of Avila
It is not true that suffering ennobles the character; happiness does that sometimes, but suffering for the most part, makes men petty and vindictive.
~ W. Somerset Maugham
Know how sublime a thing it is to suffer and be strong.
~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
In default of inexhaustible happiness, eternal suffering would at least give us a destiny. But we do not even have that consolation, and our worst agonies come to an end one day.
~ Albert Camus
If a person's basic state of mind is serene and calm, then it is possible for this inner peace to overwhelm a painful physical experience. On the other hand, if someone is suffering from depression, anxiety, or any form of emotional distress, then even if he or she happens to be enjoying physical comforts, he will not really be able to experience the happiness that these could bring.
~ Dalai Lama
We often add to our pain and suffering by being overly sensitive, over-reacting to minor things, and sometimes taking things too personally.
~ Dalai Lama
Suffering is the sandpaper of our incarnation. It does its work of shaping us.
~ Ram Dass
I have suffered too much in this world not to hope for another.
~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau
A man who suffers or stresses before it is necessary, suffers more than is necessary
~ Seneca the Younger
It is not humiliating to be unhappy. Physical suffering is sometimes humiliating, but the suffering of being cannot be, it is life.
~ Albert Camus
Suffering is part of our training program for becoming wise.
~ Ram Dass
The salvation of the world is in man's suffering.
~ William Faulkner
I can sympathize with everything, except suffering.
~ Oscar Wilde
Great artists suffer for the people.
~ Marvin Gaye
Today people are suffering from poverty, but also from lack of love
~ Pope Francis
Pain is the great teacher of mankind. Beneath its breath souls develop.
~ Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach
Suffering is necessary until you realize it is unnecessary.
~ Eckhart Tolle
Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.
~ Carl Jung
You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, that is something you are free to do and it accords with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could avoid.
~ Franz Kafka
Suffering is one of life's great teachers.
~ Bryant H. McGill
Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise.
~ George Orwell
Instead of asking ourselves, 'How can I find security and happiness?' we could ask ourselves, 'Can I touch the center of my pain? Can I sit with suffering, both yours and mine, without trying to make it go away? Can I stay present to the ache of loss or disgrace-disapp ointment in all its many forms-and let it open me?' This is the trick.
~ Pema Chodron
Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet.
~ Helen Keller
Justice turns the scale, bringing to some learning through suffering.
~ Aeschylus
Suffering is the positive element in this world, indeed it is the only link between this world and the positive.
~ Franz Kafka
Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche
Nature shows that with the growth of intelligence comes increased capacity for pain, and it is only with the highest degree of intelligence that suffering reaches its supreme point.
~ Arthur Schopenhauer
Without accepting the fact that everything changes, we cannot find perfect composure. But unfortunately, although it is true, it is difficult for us to accept it. Because we cannot accept the truth of transience, we suffer.
~ Shunryu Suzuki
Not without hope we suffer and we mourn.
~ William Wordsworth
It's at the borders of pain and suffering that the men are separated from the boys.
~ Emil Zatopek
Without suffering, there'd be no compassion.
~ Nicholas Sparks
Pain is a relatively objective, physical phenomenon; suffering is our psychological resistance to what happens. Events may create physical pain, but they do not in themselves create suffering. Resistance creates suffering. Stress happens when your mind resists what is... The only problem in your life is your mind's resistance to life as it unfolds.
~ Dan Millman
It isn't what happens to us that causes us to suffer; it's what we say to ourselves about what happens.
~ Pema Chodron
Only two things can reveal life's great secrets: suffering and love.
~ Paulo Coelho
Chance has never yet satisfied the hope of a suffering people. Action, self-reliance, the vision of self and the future have been the only means by which the oppressed have seen and realized the light of their own freedom.
~ Marcus Garvey
If only mortals would learn how great it is to possess divine grace, how beautiful, how noble, how precious. How many riches it hides within itself, how many joys and delights! No one would complain about his cross or about troubles that may happen to him, if he would come to know the scales on which they are weighed when they are distributed to men.
~ Rose of Lima
The melancholy joys of evils pass'd, For he who much has suffer'd, much will know.
~ Homer
The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.
~ Milan Kundera
Deep, unspeakable suffering may well be called a baptism, a regeneration, the initiation into a new state.
~ Ira Gershwin
Suffering is given to you that you might open your eyes to the truth.
~ Anthony de Mello
Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable... Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals.
~ Martin Luther King, Jr.
Seeing much, suffering much, and studying much, are the three pillars of learning.
~ Benjamin Disraeli
Suffering! We owe to it all that is good in us, all that gives value to life; we owe to it pity, we owe to it courage, we owe to it all the virtues.
~ Anatole France
Consciousness and Healing To proceed very far through the desert, you must be willing to meet existential suffering and work it through. In order to do this, the attitude toward pain has to change. This happens when we accept the fact that everything that happens to us has been designed for our spiritual growth.
~ M. Scott Peck
Those who can soar to the highest heights can also plunge to the deepest depths and the natures which enjoy most keenly are those which also suffer most sharply.
~ Lucy Maud Montgomery
If you put your hand into a fire, does anyone have to tell you to move it? Do you have to decide? No: When your hand starts to burn, it moves. You don’t have to direct it; the hand moves itself. In the same way, once you understand, through inquiry, that an untrue thought causes suffering, you move away from it.
~ Byron Katie
Added to their loveliness was a new mysterious suffering, perfectly silent, visible in the blue puffiness beneath their eyes or the way they would sometimes stop in mid-stride, look down, and shake their heads as though disagreeing with life.
~ Jeffrey Eugenides
It is very difficult also to sacrifice one's suffering. A man will renounce any pleasures you like but he will not give up his suffering.
~ G. I. Gurdjieff
Attachment to being right creates suffering. When you have a choice to be right, or to be kind, choose kind and watch your suffering disappear.
~ Wayne Dyer
"Dreamers and dreaming dead, lots of them from neither here nor there with no chance of getting home again, lost in place and time...
~ Janet Morris
The only time we suffer is when we believe a thought that argues with what is. When the mind is perfectly clear, what is is what we want.
~ Byron Katie
Do you want a sign that you're asleep? Here it is: you're suffering. Suffering is a sign that you're out of touch with the truth. Suffering is given to you that you might open your eyes to the truth, that you might understand that there's falsehood somewhere, just as physical pain is given to you so you will understand that there is disease or illness somewhere. Suffering occurs when you clash with reality. When your illusions clash with reality, when your falsehoods clash with truth, then you have suffering. Otherwise there is no suffering.
~ Anthony de Mello
Enjoying the joys of others and suffering with them-these are the best guides for man.
~ Albert Einstein
Your suffering is my suffering and your happiness is my happiness.
~ Gautama Buddha
We must learn to suffer what we cannot evade.
~ Michel de Montaigne
There is an art in taking the whiplash of suffering full in the face, an art you must learn. Let each single attack exhaust itself; pain always makes single attacks, so that its bite may be more intense, more concentrated. And you, while its fangs are implanted and injecting their venom at one spot, do not forget to offer it another place where it can bite you, and so relieve the pain of the first.
~ Cesare Pavese
About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters; How well they understood Its human position; how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.
~ W. H. Auden
About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters.
~ W. H. Auden
Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons.
~ Oscar Wilde
Suffering is basically the mind's refusal to accept reality as it is.
~ Marcus Thomas
As Shantideva says, suffering has many good qualities because it purifies our negative karma, increases our renunciation and compassion, reduces our pride, and helps us to overcome our bad mental habits. If we think in this way we will feel that difficult circumstances are our best friends. When our mind is balanced in this way it becomes as stable as Mount Meru, and nothing can cause it to shake.
~ Geshe Kelsang Gyatso
Suffering must be the inevitable tariff exacted from spirit for residing in human form.
~ Mark Frost
But there is suffering in life, and there are defeats. No one can avoid them. But it's better to lose some of the battles in the struggles for your dreams than to be defeated without ever knowing what you're fighting for.
~ Paulo Coelho
Affliction is a treasure, and scarce any man hath enough of it.
~ John Donne
Truth is everybody is going to hurt you: you just gotta find the ones worth suffering for.
~ Bob Marley
Suffering becomes beautiful when anyone bears great calamities with cheerfulness, not through insensibility but through greatness of mind.
~ Aristotle
Humans — who enslave, castrate, experiment on, and fillet other animals — have had an understandable penchant for pretending animals do not feel pain. A sharp distinction between humans and 'animals' is essential if we are to bend them to our will, make them work for us, wear them, eat them — without any disquieting tinges of guilt or regret. It is unseemly of us, who often behave so unfeelingly toward other animals, to contend that only humans can suffer. The behavior of other animals renders such pretensions specious. They are just too much like us.
~ Carl Sagan
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