quotations about suffering
You have to suffer in order to be a human being who can help people understand suffering.
NICHOLSON BAKER
The Anthologist
Pain and illness, the deaths of those one loves, and discomforts and disappointments mar the happy norm, but they do not alter the fact that happiness is the norm, nor affect the tendency of the continuum to restore it, to heal it, after any disturbance.
JEAN LIEDLOFF
The Continuum Concept
The brightest crowns that are worn in heaven have been tried, and smelted, and polished, and glorified through the furnace of tribulation.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
Those who have experienced traumatic events speak about their profound realizations of the importance of kindness, the power of love and their appreciation for what remains. It appears that this level of insight often comes from suffering.
DANA LIGHTMAN
Power Optimism
I am one of those whom suffering has made empty and frivolous: each night in my dreams I pull the scab off a wound; each day, vacuous and habit-ridden, I help it re-form.
CYRIL CONNOLLY
The Unquiet Grave
Never a tear bedims the eye
That time and patience will not dry.
BRET HARTE
"The Lost Galleon"
Anxiety destroys scale, and suffering makes us lose perspective.
SAUL BELLOW
"The Sealed Treasure", It All Adds Up
Your suffering is something you choose. Experience it fully. Without it you will not achieve personal growth and higher consciousness.
ERNIE J. ZELINSKI
The Lazy Person's Guide to Happiness
In some mysterious way, once one has gained an insight into human nature, that insight grows from day to day, and he to whom it has given to experience vicariously even one single form of earthly suffering acquires, by reason of this tragic lesson, an understanding of all its forms, even those most foreign to him, and apparently abnormal.
STEFAN ZWEIG
Beware of Pity
Sick system built on suffering
Sick system built on pain
It's a bullet in the head
Of every happy boy and girl
NASUM
"Sick System"
Troubles come to us like mire and filth; but, when mingled with the soil, they change to flower and fruit.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Seek not life's jewels where the poppies grow,
Nor where Desire, all passion-poisoned, rears
Her luring domes, but in the heart of woe,
With shores far washed by sanctifying tears.
EDWARD ROBESON TAYLOR
"Life's Jewels"
To rest in your own suffering
Is evasion of suffering. We must learn to suffer more.
T. S. ELIOT
The Family Reunion
Suffering is part of our training program for becoming wise.
RAM DASS
One-Liners: A Mini-Manual for a Spiritual Life
Human suffering anywhere concerns men and women everywhere.
ELIE WIESEL
Night
Trouble's made us kin.
GEORGE ELIOT
Adam Bede
The role of the human brain was to rationalize suffering.
MAILE MELOY
"The Proxy Marriage", The New Yorker, May 21, 2012
Difficulty shows what men are. Therefore when a difficulty falls upon you, remember that God, like a trainer of wrestlers, has matched you with a rough young man. Why? So that you may become an Olympic conqueror; but it is not accomplished without sweat.
EPICTETUS
Discourses
As one grows weaker one is less susceptible to suffering. There is less hurt because there is less to hurt.
JACK LONDON
The Star Rover
No man ever grows to a full man's estate without the ministration of suffering.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit