Motivational Quotes

Suffering

I felt despair. Though it seems to me now there's two kinds of it: the sort that causes a person to surrender and then the sort I had which made me take risks and make plans.

- Erica Eisdorfer

Best Quotes about Suffering

Man cannot remake himself without suffering, for he is both the marble and the sculptor.

Carrel, Alexis

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

I've suffered from all of the hang-ups known, and none is as bad as the telephone.

Armour, Richard

Never to suffer would never to have been blessed.

Edgar Allan Poe

Suffering becomes beautiful when anyone bears great calamities with cheerfulness, not through insensibility but through greatness of mind.

Aristotle

Is suffering so very serious? I have come to doubt it. It may be quite childish, a sort of undignified pastime -- I'm referring to the kind of suffering a man inflicts on a woman or a woman on a man. It's extremely painful. I agree that it's hardly bearable. But I very much fear that this sort of pain deserves no consideration at all. It's no more worthy of respect than old age or illness.

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

No one is more miserable than the person who wills everything and can do nothing.

Claudius

Who feareth to suffer suffereth already, because he feareth.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

What really raises one's indignation against suffering is not suffering intrinsically, but the senselessness of suffering.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

10.

The salvation of the world is in man's suffering.

Faulkner, William

11.

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.

Camus, Albert

12.

A misery is not to be measured from the nature of the evil, but from the temper of the sufferer.

Joseph Addison

13.

Great artists suffer for the people.

Gaye, Marvin

14.

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.

Hesse, Hermann

15.

It is better that ten guilty persons escape than one innocent suffer

Blackstone, Sir William

16.

If you learn from your suffering, and really come to understand the lesson you were taught, you might be able to help someone else who's now in the phase you may have just completed. Maybe that's what it's all about after all...

17.

But penance need not be paid in suffering...It can be paid in forward motion. Correcting the mistake is a positive move, a nurturing move.

Barbara Hall

18.

Suffering is by no means a privilege, a sign of nobility, a reminder of God. Suffering is a fierce, bestial thing, commonplace, uncalled for, natural as air. It is intangible; no one can grasp it or fight against it; it dwells in time -- is the same thing as time; if it comes in fits and starts, that is only so as to leave the sufferer more defenseless during the moments that follow, those long moments when one relives the last bout of torture and waits for the next.

Pavese, Cesare

19.

No one is so miserable as the poor person who maintains the appearance of wealth.

Spurgeon, Charles Haddon

20.

Oh, fear not in a world like this, and thou shalt know erelong, know how sublime a thing it is to suffer and be strong.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

21.

You desire to know the art of living, my friend? It is contained in one phrase: make use of suffering.

Henri-FrÚdÚric Amiel

22.

Naked I came from my mother's womb, and naked I shall return there. The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away blessed be the name of the Lord.

Bible

23.

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.

Orwell, George

24.

There is not much sense in suffering, since drugs can be given for pain, itching, and other discomforts. The belief has long died that suffering here on earth will be rewarded in heaven. Suffering has lost its meaning.

KuBler-Ross, Elisabeth

25.

Everything in life that we really accept undergoes a change. So suffering must become Love. That is the mystery.

Mansfield, Katherine

26.

The worst part a man can suffer is to have insight into much and power over nothing.

Herodotus

27.

There is no true love save in suffering, and in this world we have to choose either love, which is suffering, or happiness. Man is the more man -- that is, the more divine -- the greater his capacity for suffering, or rather, for anguish.

Unamuno, Miguel De

28.

It is not true that suffering ennobles the character; happiness does that sometimes, but suffering, for the most part, makes men petty and vindictive.

Maugham, W. Somerset

29.

But a somewhat more liberal and sympathetic examination of mankind will convince us that the cross is even older than the gibbet, that voluntary suffering was before and independent of compulsory; and in short that in most important matters a man has always been free to ruin himself if he chose.

G. K. Chesterton

30.

We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it in full.

Proust, Marcel

31.

To perceive is to suffer.

Aristotle

32.

You do not have to suffer to be a poet. Adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.

Ciardi, John

33.

Crying is the refuge of plain women, but the ruin of pretty ones.

Oscar Wilde

34.

If suffer we must, let's suffer on the heights.

Victor Hugo

35.

I have not yet met with a sorrow that could not be borne, nor with one who's passing did not leave me stronger.

Kathryn L. Nelson

36.

Rather suffer than die is man's motto.

La Fontaine, Jean De

37.

It is good for me that I was afflicted that I may learn Thy statutes. [Psalms 119:71]

Bible

38.

We all choke.

Strange, Curtis

39.

Suffering is part of the divine idea.

Beecher, Henry Ward

40.

Wisdom comes alone through suffering.

Aeschylus

41.

The truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that 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.

Thomas Merton

42.

A cold in the head causes less suffering than an idea.

Renard, Jules

43.

Man has to suffer. When he has no real afflictions, he invents some.

Jose Marti

44.

A man who suffers before it is necessary, suffers more than is necessary.

Seneca

45.

A man will renounce any pleasures you like but he will not give up his suffering.

Gurdjieff, George

46.

Although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it.

Helen Keller

47.

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 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.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott

48.

I have found that it don't really matter if you're brought up fine or rough, but that it helps to have someone to spill your sorrows to.

Erica Eisdorfer

49.

Without out suffering, our work would just be social work, very good and helpful, but it would not be the work of Jesus Christ, not part of the Redemption. All the desolation of the poor people, not only their material poverty, but their spiritual destitution, must be redeemed. And we must share it, for only by being one with them can we redeem them by bringing God into their lives and bringing them to God.

Mother Teresa

50.

If you suffer, thank God! It is a sure sign that you are alive.

Hubbard, Elbert