quotations about suffering
Let a man live but two or three years without Affliction, and he is almost good for nothing.
WELLINS CALCOTT
Thoughts Moral and Divine
The wound is the place where light enters you.
RUMI
attributed, Wild Essence: Return to the Peace & Freedom of Your Inner Wilderness
Suffering is as God's letter. Open it and read it. Many a one will find that he is titled, or that there is an inheritance laid up for him.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Birth, death, and suffering all bring us to the very edge of what our minds can understand.
RAM DASS
One-Liners: A Mini-Manual for a Spiritual Life
Extreme hopes are born of extreme misery.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
Unpopular Essays
Suffering is a lesson the Soul needs in order to get to its Beloved. Joy is too.
RAM DASS
One-Liners: A Mini-Manual for a Spiritual Life
When sufferings become unendurable the cries are no longer heard. The cries, too, fall like rain in summer.
BERTOLT BRECHT
"When Evil-Doing Comes Like Falling Rain"
A morbid propensity that causes great suffering in domestic life is often curiously infectious to the very person for whom it creates most suffering.
ADA LEVERSON
Bird of Paradise
You cannot insult a man more atrociously than by refusing to believe he is suffering.
CESARE PAVESE
This Business of Living, October 5, 1938
Suffering must be the inevitable tariff exacted from spirit for residing in human form.
MARK FROST
The List of Seven
Fire tests gold, suffering tests brave men.
LATIN PROVERB
You know, my dear, you're wrong that suffering ennobles people.... It simply makes one cross.
GREGORY BENFORD
"Nooncoming", In Alien Flesh
Even the damned in hell have the community of their suffering.
CORMAC MCCARTHY
Suttree
Still to the sufferer comes, as due from God, a glory that to suffering owes its birth.
AESCHYLUS
fragment
It's the self that suffers, and there's a place where the self--ceases. I don't know how to say it. But I believe that the reality--the truth that I recognize in suffering as I don't in comfort and happiness--that the reality of pain is not pain. If you can get through it. If you can endure it all the way.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Dispossessed
Complete success alienates a man from his fellows, but suffering makes kinsmen of us all.
ELBERT HUBBARD
The American Bible
The suffering's here
The wait is gone
The streets are filled
With a hollow song
Got a new death
It lurks outside
Follows me home
DANZIG
"End of Time"
One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or of the sight of an eye. We may not miss them, either, for one minute in a year, but if we should there is nothing to be done about it.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
Tender Is the Night
The taste of life disappears.
The flavour of all the years.
Breath is flying away.
Life is ending today.
No more suffering.
WAR AGAINST SLEEP
"Suffering"
Sometimes the only way around suffering is to go straight through it.
ANONYMOUS