Suffering Quotes

How can one be well...when one suffers morally?

Leo Tolstoy

But there is suffering in life, and there are defeats. No one can avoid them. But it's better to lose some of the battles in the struggles for your dreams than to be defeated without ever knowing what you're fighting for.

Paulo Coelho

To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.

Roberta Flack

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

Claudius

Know how sublime a thing is to suffer and be strong.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

We are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our own body, which is doomed to decay and dissolution and which cannot even do without pain and anxiety as warning signals; from the external world, which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless forces of destruction; and finally from our relations to other men. The suffering which comes from this last source is perhaps more painful than any other.

Sigmund Freud

The mind grows sicker than the body in contemplation of it's suffering.

Ovid, Tristia, Bk. IV

I knew that suffering did not enoble; it degraded. It made men selfish, petty and suspicious. It absorbed them in small things...it made them less than men; and I wrote ferociously that we learn resignation not by our own suffering, but by the suffering of others.

W. Somerset Maugham, The Summing

How little it takes to make life unbearable: a pebble in the shoe, a cockroach in the spaghetti, a woman's laugh.

H. L. Mencken

Rather suffer than die is man's motto.

Jean de La Fontaine

The afflicted are not listened to. They are like someone whose tongue has been cut out and who occasionally forgets the fact. When they move their lips no ear perceives any sound. And they themselves soon sink into impotence in the use of language, because of the certainty of not being heard.

Simone Weil

Affliction, like the iron-smith, shapes as it smites.

Christian Nevell Bovee

Who feareth to suffer suffereth already, because he feareth.

Michel de Montaigne

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

Jules Renard

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

W. Somerset Maugham

It's not life or death, the labyrinth. Suffering. Doing wrong and having wrong things happen to you.

John Green

For suffering and enduring there is no remedy, but striving and doing.

Thomas Carlyle

This exists. It can be seen. It can be touched. These in pace, these dungeons, these iron hinges, these necklets, that lofty peep-hole on a level with the river's current, that box of stone closed with a lid of granite like a tomb, with this difference, that the dead man here was a living being, that soil which is but mud, that vault hole, those oozing walls, --what declaimers!

Victor Hugo

For who would dare to assert that eternal happiness can compensate for a single moment's human suffering

Albert Camus

To see others suffer does one good, to make others suffer even more: this is a hard saying but an ancient, mighty, human, all-too-human principle [....] Without cruelty there is no festival.

Friedrich Nietzsche