Selected suffering quotes

1. I have found the paradox that if I love until it hurts, then there is no hurt, but only more love.

2. The dying, the cripple, the mental, the unwanted, the unloved they are Jesus in disguise.

3. The more ugly, older, more cantankerous, more ill and poorer I become, the more I try to make amends by making my colours more vibrant, more balanced and beaming.

4. There may be a time in life when one is tired of everything and feels as if all one does is wrong, and there maybe some truth in it - do you think this is a feeling one must try to forget and to banish, or is it 'the longing for God,' which one must not fear, but cherish to see if it may bring us some good? Is it 'the longing for God' which leads us to make a choice which we never regret? Let us keep courage and try to be patient and gentle. And not mind being eccentric, and make distinction between good and evil.

5. Who made the world I cannot tell; 'Tis made, and here am I in hell. My hand, though now my knuckles bleed, I never soiled with such a deed.

6. Life is an incurable disease.

7. To play Trivial Pursuit with a life like mine could be said to be a form of homeopathy.

8. A fate is not a punishment.

9. A man must learn to understand the motives of human beings, their illusions, and their sufferings.

10. The ethic of Reverence for Life prompts us to keep each other alert to what troubles us and to speak and act dauntlessly together in discharging the responsibility that we feel. It keeps us watching together for opportunities to bring some sort of help to animals in recompense for the great misery that men inflict upon them, and thus for a moment we escape from the incomprehensible horror of existence.

11. I used to suffer particularly because the poor animals must endure so much pain and want. The sight of an old, limping horse being dragged along by one man while another man struck him with a stick he was being driven to the Colmar slaughterhouse - haunted me for weeks.

12. The only way out of today's misery is for people to become worthy of each other's trust.

13. I have always held firmly to the thought that each one of us can do a little to bring some portion of misery to an end.

14. Whoever is spared personal pain must feel himself called to help in diminishing the pain of others. We must all carry our share of the misery which lies upon the world.

15. Grief knits two hearts in closer bonds than happiness ever can; and common sufferings are far stronger links than common joys.

16. I always wished I had died, and I still wish that, because I could have gotten the whole thing over with.

17. Not even the apparently enlightened principle of the 'greatest good for the greatest number' can excuse indifference to individual suffering. There is no test for progress other than its impact on the individual.

18. The worst takes its time to come, and then to pass.

19. No matter how long we exist, we have our memories. Points in time which time itself cannot erase. Suffering may distort my backward glances, but even to suffering, some memories will yield nothing of their beauty or their splendor. Rather they remain as hard as gems.

20. People who want a cure, provided they can have it without pain, are like those who favour progress, provided they can have it without change.

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

22. The aim of the wise is not to secure pleasure, but to avoid pain.

23. To perceive is to suffer.

24. Why is there still so much pain and suffering being produced when there's so little demand for it?

25. One thing about pain: It proves you're alive.

26. I feel much better, now that I've given up hope.

27. Time will end all my troubles, but I don't always approve of Time's methods.

28. We can all learn from our failures. What I've learned is how much it hurts to fail.

29. Before my eyes are many miserable scenes, the suffering of others and myself forces my hands to move. I become a machine for writing.

30. A wife is the earth itself, changing hands, bearing scars.

31. Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier.

32. The rain Never falls upwards. When the wound Stops hurting What hurts is The scar.

33. With the introduction of agriculture mankind entered upon a long period of meanness, misery, and madness, from which they are only now being freed by the beneficent operation of the machine.

34. One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain.

35. War is one of the scourges with which it has pleased God to afflict men.

36. Giving birth is like taking your lower lip and forcing it over your head.

37. Did it ever strike you on such a morning as this that drowning would be happiness and peace?

38. If you could see my legs when I take my boots off, you'd form some idea of what unrequited affection is.

39. Tattoos exude pain and pleasure all at the same time.

40. The vanquished know war. They see through the empty jingoism of those who use the abstract words of glory, honor, and patriotism to mask the cries of the wounded, the senseless killing, war profiteering, and chest-pounding grief.

41. I have seen war. I have seen war on land and sea. I have seen blood running from the wounded. I have seen men coughing out their gassed lungs. I have seen the dead in the mud. I have seen cities destroyed. I have seen two hundred limping exhausted men come out of line-the survivors of a regiment of one thousand that went forward forty-eight hours before. I have seen children starving. I have seen the agony of mothers and wives. I hate war.

42. 'Hey, there's something falling down in there,' said the chief clerk. Gregor tried to suppose to himself that what had happened to him might some day also happen to the chief clerk. There was no denying that anything was possible.

43. We too must suffer all the suffering around us. We all have not one body, but we have one way of growing, and this leads us through all anguish, whether in this or in that form. Just as the child develops through all the stages of life right into old age and to death (and fundamentally to the earlier stage the later one seems out of reach, in relation both to desire and to fear), so also do we develop (no less deeply bound up with mankind than with ourselves) through all the sufferings of this world. There is no room for justice in this context, but neither is there any room either for fear of suffering or for the interpretation of suffering as a merit.

44. I am nothing but a mass of spikes going through me.

45. This little woman, then, is very ill-pleased with me, she always finds something objectionable in me, I am always doing the wrong thing to her. I annoy her at every step; if a life could be cut into the smallest of small pieces and every scrap of it could be separately assessed, every scrap of my life would certainly be an offense to her.

46. But Adrian did not hear him. I have mentioned that during dinner, preoccupied with his thoughts, he had bolted his food. Nature now took its toll. An acute spasm suddenly ran though him, and with a brief 'Ouch!' of pain he doubled up and began to walk round in circles. Sir Jasper clicked his tongue impatiently. 'This is no time for doing the Astaire pom-pom dance,' he said sharply.

47. A little while ago, not much more than a few days ago, I was a child who went about in a world of colors, of hard and tangible forms. Everything was mysterious and something was hidden, guessing what it was was a game for me. If you knew how terrible it is to know suddenly, as if a bolt of lightning elucidated the earth. Now I live in a painful planet, transparent as ice; but it is as if I had learned everything at once in seconds.

48. Grosse Seelen dulden still.

49. To be crushed in the winepress of passion.

50. 'Shit!' she shouted. Amaranta, who was starting to put the clothes into the trunk, thought that she had been bitten by a scorpion. 'Where is it?' she asked in alarm. 'What?' 'The bug!' Amaranta said. Ursula put a finger on her heart. 'Here,' she said. (p. 251)

51. Desire is the cause for all your sickness and misery.

52. My one, my one, my only love, Hide, hide your face in a leaf, And let the hot tear falling burn The stupid heart that will not learn The everywhere of grief.

53. Here there is nothing but love and beauty. Ugh! it is like sitting for all eternity at the first act of a fashionable play, before the complications begin. Never in my worst moments of superstitious terror on earth did I dream that Hell was so horrible. I live, like a hairdresser, in the continual contemplation of beauty, toying with silken tresses. I breathe an atmosphere of sweetness, like a confectioner's shopboy.

54. If I should be out driving around looking for a little fun and I see an accident, one that I am not involved in, I stop immediately! Well, I want to get a good look at what's going on. I'm never too busy that I can't stop to enjoy someone else's suffering.

55. Come then, my bird! For the peace thou ever bearest, Still Heaven's messenger of comfort to me- Come-this fond bosom, O faithfullest and fairest, Bleeds with its death-wound, its wound of love for thee!

56. Paddy and I had scarcely a wink of sleep, for there was a man near us who had some nervous trouble, shell-shock perhaps, which made him cry out 'Pip!' at irregular intervals. It was a loud, startling noise, something like the toot of a small motor-horn. You never knew when it was coming, and it was a sure preventer of sleep. ...he must have kept ten or twenty people awake every night. He was an example of the kind of thing that prevents one from ever getting enough sleep when men are herded as they are in these lodging houses.'

57. The picture of war set forth in books like All Quiet on the Western Front is substantially true. Bullets hurt, corpses stink, men under fire are often so frightened that they wet their trousers. It is true that the social background from which an army springs will colour its training, tactics and general efficiency, and also that the consciousness of being in the right can bolster up morale, though this affects the civilian population more than the troops. (People forget that a soldier anywhere near the front line is usually too hungry, or frightened, or cold, or, above all, too tired to bother about the political origins of the war.) But the laws of nature are not suspended for a 'red' army any more than for a 'white' one. A louse is a louse and a bomb is a bomb, even though the cause you are fighting for happens to be just.

58. These things really happened, that is the thing to keep one's eye on. They happened even though Lord Halifax said they happened. The raping and butchering in Chinese cities, the tortures in the cellars of the Gestapo, the elderly Jewish professors flung into cesspools, the machine-gunning of refugees along the Spanish roads - they all happened, and they did not happen any the less because the Daily Telegraph has suddenly found out about them when it is five years too late.

59. They [the wise spirits of antiquity in the first circle of Dante's Inferno] are condemned, Dante tells us, to no other penalty than to live in desire without hope, a fate appropriate to noble souls with a clear vision of life.

60. I am gall, I am heartburn. God's most deep decree Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me; Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse. Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see The lost are like this, and their scourge to be As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.

61. One of the advantages of a great sorrow is that nothing else seems painful.

62. It is something to have wept as we have wept, It is something to have done as we have done, It is something to have watched when all men slept, And seen the stars which never see the sun. It is something to have smelt the mystic rose, Although it break and leave the thorny rods, It is something to have hungered once as those Must hunger who have ate the bread of gods.

63. Sola la miseria e senza invidia nelle cose presenti.

64. Always. Difficulties happen and you get through them. When I say 'no llores,' it doesn't just mean literally crying; it means looking at the bad things in your life rather than the positive. I always think of Celia Cruz as an inspiration. So many times I saw her backstage and her knee was killing her and I had to help her up the steps, but she would step on that stage and nobody knew that she was hurting.

65. 'Do you really not know,' he said, 'that there exist souls that are ceaselessly in torment? That are driven now to dreams, now to action, driven from the purest passions to the most orgiastic pleasures? No wonder we fling ourselves into all kinds of fantasies and follies!'

66. Small Mabel whimpered all night long, For calling herself the cause. Her oak-eyed mother did no thing But change the bloody gauze.

67. Memories and possibilities are ever more hideous than realities.

68. The children eat and wriggle and laugh, The two old ladies stroke their silk; But the cat is grown small and thin with desire, Transformed to a creeping lust for milk.

69. 'In my profession I have learned that women can bear more pain than men.'

70. 'That,' I said, 'would be a blessing. There are so many things I'd like to forget I hardly know what would be left standing, if I ever got started.'

71. I had now been on board the frigate upward of a year, and remained unscourged; the ship was homeward-bound, and in a few weeks, at most, I would be a free man. And now, after making a hermit of myself in some things, in order to avoid the possibility of the scourge, here it was hanging over me for a thing utterly unforeseen, for a crime of which I was as utterly innocent. But all that was as naught.

72. Billy's agony, mainly proceeding from a generous young heart's virgin experience of the diabolical incarnate and effective in some men-the tension of that agony was over now.

73. Among all creatures that breathe on earth and crawl on it there is not anywhere a thing more dismal than man is.

74. Les souffrances disposent a la devotion, et presque toutes les jeunes filles, poussees par une tendresse instinctive, inclinent au mysticisme, le cote profond de la religion.

75. Nam neque divitibus contingunt gaudia solis, nec vixit male, qui natus moriensque fefellit.

76. It is nonsense, Mr. Burke, to suppose I can live. My sufferings are great but they will soon be over.

77. 'Tis Summer Time on Bredon, And now the farmers swear: The cattle rise and listen In valleys far and near, And blush at what they hear. But when the mists in autumn On Bredon top are thick, And happy hymns of farmers Go up from fold and rick, The cattle then are sick.

78. The utter collapse of this Profoundly criminal Bush conspiracy will come none too soon for people like me... The massive plundering of the U.S. Treasury and all its resources has been almost on a scale that is criminally insane, and has literally destroyed the lives of millions of American people and American families. Exactly. You and me, sport - we are the ones who are going to suffer, and suffer massively. This is going to be just like the Book of Revelation said it was going to be - the end of the world as we knew it.

79. The safest and most suitable form of penance seems to be that which causes pain in the flesh but does not penetrate to the bones, that is, which causes suffering but not sickness. So the best way seems to be to scourge oneself with thin cords which hurt superficially, rather than to use some other means which might produce serious internal injury.

80. To the fanatical believer physical and spiritual suffering is beside the point, compared with salvation. That is why, to him, everything happening around him is irrelevant, a mirror-image, a mere will-o'-the-wisp. ... I can really never get shot of them, the fanatics. Whether they appear as religious fanatics or vegetarian fanatics makes no odds. They're catastrophic people. These types whose whole cast of mind as it were looks beyond mere human beings toward some unknown goal. The terrible thing is the great power they often wield over their fellow human beings. Apart from the fact that I believe they suffer like the very devil, I've no sympathy for them.

81. Bergman is undeniably one of the great directors, but he has always stood for more than the sum of his films. From the first, he was regarded : as a visionary who grappled with the Big Questions of God and Man. His symbol-thick films were drenched in the night sweats of mortal torment. He was the kind of artist we had been brought up to believe was the real deal: He suffered for our souls.

82. You're going to watch a person suffer in agony while somebody's debating?

83. God consents but not always.

84. Whose starward eye Saw chariot 'swing low'? And who was he That breathed that comforting, melodic sigh, 'Nobody knows de trouble I see'?

85. We fatuously hoped that we might pluck from the human tragedy itself a consciousness of a common destiny which should bring its own healing, that we might extract from life's very misfortunes a power of cooperation which should be effective against them.

86. Listen to this, and I'll tell you 'bout the heartache I'll tell you 'bout the heartache and the loss of God.

87. I'll take the shooting, I've been shot a couple times before, and I think I can take it.

88. There's not a hair Sticks on my head but, like a leaden plummet, It sinks me to the grave: I must creep thither; The journey is not long.

89. There is a place, List, daughter! in a black and hollow vault, Where day is never seen; there shines no sun, But flaming horror of consuming fires; A lightless sulphur, choked with smoky fogs Of an infected darkness; in this place Dwell many thousand thousand sundry sorts Of never-dying deaths.

90. [T]he Jews are enduring their present troubles because of Christ.

91. He hath the sor which no man heleth, The which is cleped lack of herte.

92. Woman, please let me explain I never meant to cause you sorrow or pain So let me tell you again and again and again... I love you Now and forever.

93. 'The twentieth century was the great century of Christian martyrs, and this is true both in the Catholic Church and in other Churches and ecclesial communities.'

94. 1300 BC: God gives Ten Commandments to Israelites, making them His Chosen People and granting them eternal protection under Divine Law. Nothing bad ever happens to Jews again.

95. Que el cielo exista, aunque mi lugar sea el infierno.

96. He [God] owes me an apology too- at the very least. I'm not saying I shouldn't have been punished for those sins I committed. I'm saying that the punishments he chose were inhuman. I wonder what favor I'd want. I think I may be afraid to ask for it. I'm afraid He won't grant it. I'm more afraid that He will. Wouldn't it be tragic to find out that He really has been here all this time?

97. They shall not live who have not tasted death. They only sing who are struck dumb by God.

98. Because Mankind is glad and brave and young, Full of gay flames that white and scarlet glow, All joys and passions that Mankind may know By you were nobly felt and nobly sung. Because Mankind's heart every day is wrung By Fate's wild hands that twist and tear it so, Therefore you echoed Man's undying woe, A harp Aeolian on Life's branches hung.

99. They open doorways that I thought were shut for good. They read me Gurdjieff and Jesu. They build up my body, break me emotionally. It's nearly killing me, but what a lovely feeling!

100. Hey there, you lady in tears, Do you think that they care if they're real, woman? They just take it as part of the deal.