Suffering Quotes

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...

Source Unknown

Affliction is a treasure, and scarce any man hath enough of it.

John Donne

I can sympathize with everything, except suffering.

Oscar Wilde

To become a spectator of one's own life is to escape the suffering of life.

Oscar Wilde

If I did not believe, if I did not make what is called an act of faith (and each act of faith increases our faith, and our capacity for faith), if I did not have faith that the works of mercy do lighten the sum total of suffering in the world, so that those who are suffering on both sides of this ghastly struggle somehow mysteriously find their pain lifted and some balm of consolation poured on their wounds, if I did not believe these things, the problem of evil would indeed be overwhelming.

Dorothy Day, On Pilgrimage

Suffering so someone else didn't have to suffer. Sacrificing your body for someone else's well being.

Jodi Picoult

The poor man shuddered, overflowed with an angelic joy; he declared in his transport that this would last through life; he said to himself that he really had not suffered enough to deserve such radiant happiness, and he thanked God, in the depths of his soul, for having permitted that he, a miserable man, should be so loved by this innocent being.

Victor Hugo

It is a glorious thing to be indifferent to suffering, but only to one's own suffering.

Robert Lynd

You know quite well, deep within you, that there is only a single magic, a single power, a single salvation...and that is called loving. Well, then, love your suffering. Do not resist it, do not flee from it. It is your aversion that hurts, nothing else.

Hermann Hesse

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

Seneca (Seneca the Elder)

What was hard to suffer is sweet to remember.

Seneca (Seneca the Elder)

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.

Cesare Pavese

Suffering is the ancient law of love; there is not quest without pain; there is no lover who is not also a martyr.

Heinrich Suso

Though all afflictions are evils in themselves, yet they are good for us, because they discover to us our disease and tend to our cure.

John Tillotson

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

William Faulkner

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

Friedrich Nietzsche